A Review: 1921’s The Sheik by E.M. Hull
October 12, 2007
A Contribution To The Edgar Rice Burroughs
Library Project.
A Review
The Sheik
by
E.M. Hull
by R.E. Prindle
The Novel
The Sheik by E.M. Hull is found in ERB’s library. The novel published at the beginning of 1921 was a runaway bestseller going through thirty-0ne printings by October. My copy is of the thirty-first printing. How many more it may have gone through I am not aware.
The book was quickly made into the movie of the same name starring Rudolph Valentino and released on November 20th of the same year. Thus the impact would have been redoubled on ERB reading the book and seeing the movie.
Having troubles in his relations with Emma, he was somewhat bedeviled by what she wanted as Freud was by what women wanted. The Sheik presented one woman’s solution to the problem of what women want. The Englishwoman E.M. Hull examined the problem in some detail. Her solution would find expression in ERB’s Tarzan And The Ant Men of 1923 in the story of the Alalus women.
2.
While Mrs. Hull’s novel is invariably reviewed as a soft core porn novel it is actually quite a serious attempt to explore what women want. Not a potboiler, the story is well thought out and carefully constructed.
The story falls into the category of the desert nomad thriller.
The scene is somewhere between Biskra and Oran in Algeria. Biskra is the southernmost point on the railroad from the coast to the Sahara in the East of Algeria. It is an oasis area and was a winter resort for Europeans. This area was also the scene of Robert Hitchen’s The Garden Of Allah and the Sahara scenes from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Return Of Tarzan.
The Author
As with Hitchens’ the desert serves as a symbol for self-realization and redemption. The story was written as the career of the rebel Abd El Krim was reaching its apex in the Rif. Krim’s story was terrifically romantic for women of the era. I had a high school history teacher in the fifties who was still capable of gushing about Krim thinking him the most manly and desirable of men.
As with Hitchens the story revolves around a man and a woman. The woman an Englishwoman and the man a Krim like sheik of the desert.
3.
The woman is appropriately named Diana. Diana was the virgin huntress of Greek mythology who spurned all relations with men thus putting her in enmity with Aphrodite. She is somehow related to the Lady Of The Lake of ancient Lacedaemon which name means Lady Of The Lake and in a line of progression to the Northern European archetype of the second half of the Piscean Age. This is a rather strange female archetype to represent the Northern European psyche. She is a cold unloving symbol that may have something to do with the European character.
Whether Mrs. Hull knew these things or not she represents them perfectly in her story. This is quite extraordinary.
Thus her Diana was raised by her brother as a boy. She is represented throughout the story as an ambiguous girl-boy, nearly a hermaphrodite. She is herself a skilled huntress who has no use for men. As the story opens she has yet to be kissed. Mrs. Hull skillfully represents the respect that Northern European men have for their women which in itself may be conditioned by the Diana image. They are easily put off. When one man asks Diana for a kiss he accepts his rejection with equanimity asking only if they can at least be pals.
The Sheik as the wild man of the desert knowing no law but his will offers quite a contrast. By the time of Mrs. Hull’s novel ERB had already explored the same literary territory in the Return Of Tarzan and The Lad And The Lion as well as The Cave Girl. I would hesitate to say Mrs. Hull had read Burroughs but the Sheik is portrayed as a Tarzan like superman in a decidedly pulp manner.
The Sheik does not observe any civilized niceties. At one point Mrs. Hull refers to his civilization being less than skin deep. As the Sheik, Ahmed, says, if he wants something he takes it. Having seen Diana in the marketplace of Biskra he sets out to kidnap and rape her. There are no other words for it and Mrs. Hull does not mince them.
His plan worked out so that he buys off Diana’s desert guide to deliver her to him on the first night out of Biskra. Prior to that he surreptitiously serenaded her on the night before even entering her room in the dark while she is there to replace the bullets in her pistol with blanks to prevent her from shooting him in the desert which she did attempt to do.
4.
Now, Mrs. Hull is presenting an allegory so the novel is filled with symbols. The key symbol is the horse. The horse is, of course, a symbol of the female associated with the Greek god Poseidon. In ancient times the symbol of the bull was associated with the missing y chromosome of the female being replaced in Patriarchal times with the horse. Thus the Patriarchal goddess Athene is sometimes represented as horse headed.
When the guide brings Diana a horse to ride it is a magnificent creature much better than she might have expected from a commercial enterprise. The horse has actually been provided by Ahmed the Sheik so as Diana leaves Biskra she is already mounted on the Sheik’s horse- a powerful sexual symbol. The horse is trained to respond to signals from The Sheik.
The story is filled with horses and horse races between she and the Sheik. In one race the Sheik gives her a minute to stop or he will shoot her horse dead which he does. He then places Diana in front of him on his horse (these horses are all magnificent and beyond magnificent) at which point she realizes that she is not only in love with the Sheik but has been for some time.
Previous to this time she had noted in the camp
…but it was the horses that struck Diana principally. They were everywhere, some tethered, some wandering loose, some excercising in the hands of grooms.
So everywhere is the symbol of the female. At this stage Diana has been sexually subordinated to the Sheik but she is intellectually resisting. The Sheik puts on a demonstration of how useless her resistance is as he fully intends to break her.
A man eater is brought out who has killed a man earlier that morning. The horse obviously represents Diana. Some two or three men attempt to break the horse but they all fail. Then the Sheik mounts. The result is a thoroughly exhausted and beaten horse. She stops fighting with her legs splayed while the Sheik jumps off. Then the horse rolls over left with no will of its own.
This is exactly Diana’s situation. Earlier she had boasted to her brother: I will do what I choose, and I will never obey any will but my own.
That is now proven an empty boast as the Diana riding in front of the Sheik chooses to obey the Sheik’s will.
Perhaps Mrs. Hull has prophesied the submission of England’s will of today to the desert Sheiks. As of now the Moslems have all but assumed religious control of England. Thus England as Diana has submitted its sexuality to the sons of the Sheiks.
However Diana’s Sheik still has to prove himself as the dominant male of his society to retain her allegiance. One hesitates to say that she perversely tests him nevertheless having been cautioned to take care on her desert rides she insists on going too far afield. Naturally she and her seven man escort are ambushed by the fat swarthy greasy rival sheik’s men. Six of the seven escorts die joyously defending their sheik’s property. The seventh, the sheik’s European manservant gets the classic bullet crease alongside the head. Diana disappears into the fat greasy sheik’s tent. This guy is everything an Arab sheik should have been in contemporary European eyes. Fat, greasy, swarthy, unbelievably smelly, uncouth to the nth degree. There’s no doubt there’s the fate worse than death for the boyish, sylphlike, slender, lithe Diana. Yes, it seems pretty certain, unless…
Here comes the Sheik with a small but loyal and dedicated band of followers eager to die for their leader. Just as the greasy, swarthy sheik has got it out and ready in crashes Ahmed in the nick of time. Rather than shooting the bastard and getting it over with he wants to dispatch El Greaso by hand. As we all know strangling a a struggling strong man takes a little time. Enough time for El Greaso’s vile Ebon followers to burst into the tent. Right behind them come Ahmed’s men. Shades of Tarzan! Ahmed takes a severe blow to the head and a couple long blades in the back.
Will he live? After muttering a couple pages similar to the last words of Dutch Schultz the matter is in the hands of Allah and the European surgeon. As much as I like having god on my side, in certain situations a good surgeon is even better.
Nevertheless if Ahmed lives he has proven himself to be the right man for Diana. Interestingly the virgin huntress has submitted to the law of Aphrodite. The European archetype has accepted the dominance of the Moslem Arab.
Well, almost. In the first place the tribe of Ahmed is very interesting according to his French friend who arrived in time for the big battle. It seems that Ahmed’s tribe is different from the rest of the desert greasers. It is inferred that his tribe is one of the legendary White tribes supposed to be living in the Sahara. Undoubtedly a surviving remnant of Atlantis that moved South when the Mediterranean flooded.
Why, in addition, it turns out that Ahmed isn’t even an Arab. It seems that he’s actually English. Well, an English Spanish blend. His English father when in his cups did some unspeakable thing to Ahmed’s mother when she was pregnant with him and she was found by Ahmed Sr. Ahmed Jr.’s adopted father wandering dazed and confused beneath the broiling desert sun.
Taken in she dropped Ahmed Jr. and died. The baby was raised as the successor to Ahmed Sr. But he developed an uncontrollable hatred for England, its people and all things English. That’s why he captured and raped Diana over and over. But it’s OK, they both realize they love each other now.
The lesson seems to be that that’s what woman wants: a man who can earn her repect by dominating and controlling her while at the same time being the dominant male in his society, being able to provide all her wants and desires while being able to defend her from the El Greasos of the world. So all the necessary elements come together here and we have a marriage if not made in heaven perfect for terrestrial travails.
If nothing else ERB learned where he had failed Emma in the beginning but who now wondered in his own role of sheik where the rewards from Emma were.
I’m going to speculate that ERB read the story in 1921. He might have enjoyed Valentino in the movie but I think it improbable that the silent film came near capturing the nuances of the novel. I’m sure the signficance of Diana as female European archetype didn’t come through on celluloid.
Was it even in Mrs. Hull’s mind one may perhaps ask. Is it possible I’m projecting my beliefs on Mrs. Hull’s story? It is possible but consider this passage in The Sheik:
He was so young, so strong, so made to live. He had so much to live for. He was essential to his people. They needed him. If she could only die for him. In the days when the world was young the gods were kind, they listened to the prayers of hapless lovers and accepted the life they were offered in the place of the beloved whose life was claimed. If God would but listen to her now.
So we know that Mrs. Hull was read in Greek mythology. It would seem inevitable that she was familiar with the stories of King Arthur to some degree. Certainly she knew the story of Merlin and Vivian. She was a writer. Knowing little about Mrs. Hull it is impossible for me to know for certain exactly what she read or understood. And yet, there it is in the pages of her novel if one has eyes to see. The Sheik is as much a work of mythology as is that of Burroughs’ Tarzan. It is possible that neither was conscious of what they were saying but the information taken into their minds was transformed subconsciously, at least, into the form in which it issued forth from their pens. It works that way for writers. I am often astonished at the subliminal message of what I write. Did I intend it? Must have. There it is. Still, I do put myself into a mild trance when I’m writing so that I concentrate on words rather than ideas. So the words are more conscious while the content is more subliminal. We know ERB wrote from a trancelike state and Mrs. Hull’s story has that quality. I think we have enough evidence to know that she had read the mythological material so that whether she had consciously formulated her ideas they come out in her writing. In short, I don’t think I’m projecting much if anything. Tra la.
There is no doubt that The Sheik made a big impression on ERB. The question is how did he understand it. His first reaction appeared in 1923’s Tarzan And The Ant Men in the weird parody of the Alalus people in which he reverses the male-female roles with the women being stronger and dominant. As Ahmed figures the women brutally dominate the men. Using them for sexual pleasure then discarding them. ERB’s story seems to be tongue in cheek but without a reference point the ridiculous story is hard to follow. With E.M. Hull’s The Sheik I believe we have the reference point.
It seems clear that Mrs. Hull was influenced by Robert Hitchens’ The Garden Of Allah. What is not clear is whether she was influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs and if so by what novels. The Sheik follows a pulp format. So, if Mrs. Hull read the pulps on a regular basis there is no reason to believe that she was not familiar with some of his work as Burroughs certainly by 1920 when she probably began the novel was already the premier pulp writer.
If that was the case it seems likely that she might have read The Return Of Tarzan and The Lad And The Lion, perhaps The Cave Girl. If she read Lad then she reversed the roles of the chief male and female characters making the Woman English and the man Arab.
I haven’t read the magazine version of The Lad And The Lion so I am not sure of the specific changes ERB made between the 1913 version and the 1938 rewrite for book publication. The rewrite shows clear evidence of influence from The Sheik unless of course Mrs. Hull was reflecting the influence of the Lad on herself. In any event the two books reflect an influence from one to the other.
So, as with Trader Horn and Burroughs it is possible that Hull was influenced by Burroughs and with both of these authors Burroughs reading of them was reflected in his subsequent writing.
Our list of reciprocal influences is growing when one adds that of H.G. Wells. What once seemed simple grows more complex.
Postscript: I have since learned that Mrs. Hull was a student of mythology.
Part VII Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
October 6, 2007
Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
by
R.E. Prindle
Part VII
Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Sequels
The return from San Diego in March-April 1914 was a turning point in Burroughs’ life. In a sense it was a childhood’s end. The past was now the past. ERB’s future lay ahead.
The fact that he had won the gamble of the stay in San Diego being able to spend recklessly and still have his back financially covered must have been a tonic to his self-confidence. He was able to do nearly anything he wanted to do. One was to begin his library. A key book in his library was Edward Gibbon’s Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. He recorded its purchase date in 1913 and the day he completed the work just after his birthday in 1915. One imagines that by the time he wrote his three sequels in mid-1914 he had read a few of the volumes of his twelve volume set.
This is important because reading Gibbon is a life changing event. In the language of the sixties the history is consciousness expanding. In a sense it is a transition from childhood to maturity.
It is impossible to stress sufficiently the changes that ERB is going through or the rapidity of the changes. Already just returned from San Diego he is purchasing a new automobile, a Hudson. It is perhaps no coincidence that The Mad King opens with Barney Custer/ERB careening down the road in a new Roadster. That it is gray is of very little significance because the only colors available in 1914 were probably grey and black. Or perhaps as the Hudson appears to be grey in black and white photos Barney’s car for that reason was grey.
One can only imagine the exhilaration ERB experienced as he climbed behind the wheel of big new touring car. It was Hudson not a cheap Ford. Nineteen fourteen was also a turning point in the history of Ford Motors. ERB always disparages Fords in these years proud that he’s driving a more expensive automobile. The woes of not being able to afford a car from 1903 on must have melted away.
Not only did ERB buy a new car but he and his family of wife and three children moved into luxurious new quarters in the affluent Chicago suburb of Oak Park. So ERB began a new life on his return to Chicago.
Shortly after his return Tarzan Of The Apes was released in book form by A.C. McClurg. Magazine and newspaper response to his stories had been terrific so there was no reason for Burroughs not to anticipate large sales. One can imagine him sitting up nights calculating the number. A hundred thousand? Too low. A million? Well, if he got really lucky. We’ve all enjoyed the anticipation of some sort along those lines.
The book was released in May, 1914 but there is no indication that McClurg’s even sold through the fifteen thousand of the contract or, indeed, that they even ever printed that many. The title was turned over to the reprint house of A.L. Burt early the next year in 1915. Burt was so uncertain of the books reception that they made McClurgs guarantee the first printing. When Burt turned the title over to Grossett and Dunlap they claimed to have sold less than seven hundred thousand copies at fifty cents each. Royalties were only four and a half cents a copy of which McClurg’s got half so Burroughs realized a mere pittance.
So what then?
He was thrown back almost wholly on his magazine revenues. He began to receive some money from newspaper syndication but this was relatively a pittance given his expectations. Within a few years movie money would begin coming in but for the time being Burroughs had to keep writing bcause as usual he was spending in advance of receipts.
I believe one can detect a change in the style of his writing at this point.
Whereas prior to the return from San Diego with the energy of the bloom of Spring relying perhaps on stories that had evolved in his mind as he daydreamed in the lean years stories just flowed from his pen. It seems likely that he exhausted that reservoir in San Diego so that now he had actually to work at dreaming up stories. In all three of the titles the sequels are significantly longer than the first halves while changing from personal revelations more toward formal stories.
The editorship of Munsey’s had also changed from Metcalf to Bob Davis- Robert H. Davis. From the available evidence Metcalf seems to have been the more tolerant and indulgent of Burroughs’ writing. When Davis was assigned Burroughs in 1914 the latter was an established star of the Munsey stable of writers. Davis wrote an autobiography c. 1940 that I haven’t been able to obtain but which should have much information on his dealing with ERB.
Davis appears to have been much more critical of Burroughs, even bullying him, pushing suggestions on him that the vulnerable writer couldn’t resist. Davis was the one who suggested that Tarzan have a son something Burroughs always regretted doing. Davis seems to have been of the opinion that ERB used a number of trite situations, situations that have subsequently been amply exploited by the movies. Not having grown up in ERB’s milieu and being sufficienctly underread in the various literatures of the times I am unable to say whether or not Burroughs presentation of Barney Custer’s execution by firing squad was trite or not as Davis states. Why Davis should have accepted the grazing of the head by the bullet that has become so commonplace in the movies and rejected the first episode is beyond me.
That Davis accepted Barney’s escape through the sewer without a demur when the episode is a blatant plagiarism of Jean Valjean’s escape through the sewer in Les Miserables is beyond me also. Burroughs even duplicates the upturned face as the filth rises about Valjean. ERB does provide the original twist of Barney being completely submerged in the sewage. Gruesome enough.
So Davis’ intent seems to have been a contest for control and dominance. It seems then that there were large variations between the magazine stories and the published books as ERB reinserted deleted passages and changed details back to his original writing. Overall, from the available evidence, I hold an unfavorable opinion of Davis’ interference.
On the home front, while ERB may have thought to find acceptance for his success as a writer and his newfound prosperity he was to be bitterly disappointed as his writing was disparaged and his topics made him a literary clown in his contemporaries eyes. To my undertanding he has never been accorded the respect that is his due to this day either in Oak Park or Chicago.
The fact is that he was able to please his audience in the pulp fiction genre mightily not only in 1913-14 but for at least a quarter century until his medium, pulp fiction, began to flounder in the thirties and forties. Having now read so many of his novels four to six times I am beginning now to have a much greater respect for ERB’s writing abilities.
The sequels of all three novels under consideration show an extreme focus on exactly what the story is and told with great economy yet with words so well chosen that the reader learns everything that he has to know. I am especially impressed with the single minded drive of The Mad King.
While obviously desiring acceptance and even importance in Chicago’s society ERB made an effort to be accepted by the newspaper columnists he had so admired from young manhood on. These men were very much admired by ERB. Indeed the columnists occupied a position analogous to the drive time radio commentators of our day. Chicago had some of the best.
Burroughs had collections of Eugene Field and George Ade in his library so that it is clear that he was much influenced by them. He does not seem to have cared for Peter Finley Dunne and his Mr. Dooley Irish dialect stories. Now as man he began to contribute to the successors of Field and Ade. Bert Leston Taylor’s column A Line Of Type Or Two in the Chicago Tribune printed some of Burroughs’ verse submitted under his pseudonym, Normal Bean, as well as another column in the Tribune, In The Wake Of The News by Hugh E. Keogh also known as HEK. (source: Porges) Both columns were prestigious so that the acceptance of ERB’s verse would indicate that it was high enough quality for the columns. After all it isn’t that easy to get into such columns or even have a letter to the editor published. Burroughs also joined the White Paper Club that sounds like a catchall scribblers club. He was ignored and shunned by the prestigious clubs.
A note on cars and then to the books on review. In 1913 he had and sold a Velie. In 1914 he bought and drove a Hudson while he drove a Mitchell in 1915.
The Velie is of interest (see http://www.angelfire.com/mt/velie/ )
The Velie was a low priced model bought second hand so it probably didn’t put ERB out too much. Willard Velie attended Yale at the same time as the Burroughs Boys graduating in 1888. One wonders if the Brothers knew of Velie at Yale. Perhaps such a knowledge may have influenced Burroughs choice or perhaps not.
The choice of the Hudson was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that ERB’s hero, L. Frank Baum, who ERB almost certainly visited in 1913, drove one.
If there is a possible story behind the Mitchell I haven’t learned it as yet. Also it shoud be noted that the movie industry did not affect Baum’s decision to move to Hollywood. Cecil B. Demille and Jesse Lasky didn’t step off the train in LA until 1914 when they introduced Hollywood to the movies.
2.
So now ERB began to organize his life around his future rather than his past. The first burst of writing in which he released his pent up emotions was now spent. On the return to Chicago his writing becomes a vocation in which he had to turn out stories every year for the pulps so that he became a professional writer rather than a quasi-amateur.
Tarzan Of The Apes was published in May upon his return but it would seem to disappointing sales. It was even difficult for McClurg’s to get the reprint firm of A.L. Burt to take it however it did well for Burt although apparently not in the spectacular numbers so often reported. Nevertheless money began to come in from that source.
Burroughs’ writing would also be influenced by the political situation presented by the Wobblies or I.W.W. as well as the outbreak of the Great War in August. That conflict became the subject of the sequel to The Mad King that was written after the war began.
The tone of the three sequels then changed from the first halves becoming less personal in their presentation but still concerned with ERB’s relationship with Emma.
The opening sequence of The Cave Girl-The Mad King-The Eternal Lover was changed to The Cave Man-Sweethearts Primeval (Eternal Lover)-and Barney Custer Of Beatrice (Mad King).
Barney Custer of Beatrice seems to display some first hand knowledge of Bert Weston’s business so it is possible that ERB and family visited Weston and Beatrice on the way back from California. In the only letter in the Weston correspondence near the 1914 date, that of June 14, ERB does not allude to any such visit which may or may not mean anything.
The Cave Man then was written first of the sequels as was The Cave Girl of the original stories. There are very significant elements to the story. ERB would later use the Nadara as the White Goddess in Tarzan And The Leopard Men. That in turn links Nadara to La and thence to Florence. In this story Nadara has been captured by some aborigines and made their goddess as will be Kali Bwana. Just as Nadara was wearing the Panther pelt so Kali Bwana would be associated with the Leopard as goddess of the Leopard Men. So both women are invested with ERB’s symbol of female sexuality.
Just as the long temple here was on a river so would be the Leopard temple. Waldo as Thandar uses the roof as does Tarzan. ERB thus duplicates the story. As Florence entered his life he began to associate her with this early dream of Nadara as well as her successor, La. Signficantly La makes her last appearance in 1930s Tarzan The Invincible transformed to reappear immediately as Kali Bwana of Leopard Men. That would indicate that by 1930 ERB had decided to leave Emma for Florence.
Another interesting twist is the similarity of Nadara and the temple to those of Trader Horn. We know that Trader Horn read Burroughs so it is probable that he somehow picked up a copy of the magazine version of Cave Man gestating the story for a decade or so when it came out of his head in 1927. Thus the close association of Burroughs and Horn before and after the publication of the latter’s story. Keeps getting more and more interesting, doesn’t it?
A second major issue seems to be ERB trying to reconcile himself and his parents. The second half of the Cave Man is very concerned with portraying Thandar/ERB’s father as a fine old man in contrast to the crazy deaf mute of Lad And The Lion. In this story the father figure is sympathetic while the mother figure is more harsh. She does become reconciled to Nadara in the end when she learns the girl is a French Princess. French again. One wonders if ERB’s mother was opposed to his marrying Emma.
Nadara herself who waffles between a representation of Emma/Jane and La in the Cave Girl begins Cave Man as more Ema but becomes morel like La/Kali Bwana as the story progresses ending strongly as the latter which would indicate that ERB already preferred his dream Golden Girl to Emma. He finally settled for the rather commonplace Florence as his version of the Wild Thing.
The story opens with the usual adventures. Getting Nadar back to her people it is necessary to kill King Big Fist to keep her. Thus we have a series of male images that reflect ERB’s conflict with Frank Martin.
Big Fist dead the people appoint Tandar/Waldo as their king. Thandar is in the process of converting the tribe to American Democracy when the earth quake strikes. In addition to head bashing one is astonished at the role earthquakes play in these early stories along with memory loss.
In this one Thandar/Waldo is creating a new society somewhat in imitation of the bizarre improvements Jules Verne made to his Mysterious Island when the earthquake strikes ending Thandar’s experiment.
The earthquake separates him from Nadara who is then pursued by another neanderthal type; perhaps this is a varation on the theme of ERB’s ccontest with marank Martin for Emma’s hand.
In a bizarre episode Thandar puts to sea in a bobbing strange little boat finally falling in with Pirates. From then on the story resembles Pirate Blood. Pirate Blood appeared at the same time as his relationship with Florence developed so the two are proable related to his Anima fantasies.
All comes out right in the end as the Pirates restore the belongings of Waldo’s father and mother whose yacht they had captured. Thandar rescues Nadara, all are reunited and Thandar/Waldo and Nadara are able to consummate their natural union with the marriage rites of civilization. An odd little story overall.
ERB next turned to the sequel of The Eternal Lover, Sweethearts Primeval. I just like this story. Nu and Victoria return to the Niocene. ERB missed some opportunities here. While Nu left the Niocene to go to the present Nat-ul never did. So when Victoria made her first trip to the Niocene both she and Nat-Ul should have been there. It would have been well if ERB had explained how their two being meshed after the munerous rebirths of Nat-Ul that produced Victoria.
In this story Nat-Ul who is a variation of La, and Nu become separated. The story is their attempt to reunite. Once again a character who may represent Frank Martin attempts to abduct Nat-Ul but she escapes him to fall into the clutches of another cave man only to escape finding her way to a small island.
The imagery is quite wonderful. Burroughs at his best. The scenery is quite reminiscent of Pellucidar with its coasts and islands. The pirate theme is also prominent in the Pellucidar stories of this time.
Nat-Ul manages to be abducted a number of times escaping each time.
Nu is hampered in his search for Nat-Ul by the appearance of a woman named Gron the wife of Tur of the Boat People. She attches herself to Num who has a difficult time getting rid of her. In the end Nu goes off in seach of the tiger OO this time dying while Victoria/Nat-Ul returns to the present leaving a hole in Space and Time.
In the end we learn that the whole story of Nu took place in the three mintues Victoria was unconcious.
Burroughs then turned to the sequel of The Mad King. The reversal in sequence of The Mad King and The Eternal Lover was necessitated by the fact that after the first part of The Mad King Barney had gone to Africa so that it was now necessary to get him back to Lutha.
Thus the Mad King and The Eternal Lover are actually one novel of the History of Barney Custer. The two books could be combined and titled something like The Adventures Of Barney Custer in Lutha and Africa.
The proper way to read the two books then is Part I of The Mad King, both parts of The Eternal Lover and then the sequel to The Mad King.
After losing Emma in Mad King Part I, Barney goes to Africa to ‘forget’ along with Butzow. Leaving Africa we next find him and Butzow in Beatrice, Nebraska visiting Bert and Margaret and their grain mill.
If Peter of Bletz had lost rack of Barney in Africa he relocates him in Beatrice (I am informed that Beatrice if pronounced Be-at-trice). After a failed murder attempt by Peter’s henchman Maenck Barney and Butzow return to Lutha.
As the story was written after the beginning of the Great War Austria is now attempting to annex Lutha. Apparently ERB was opposed to Austria as he sides with the Serbs.
Having been unable to forget Emma in Africa Barney now attempts to win her hand from King Leopold.
Barney and Leopold are yet another variation on The Prince And The Pauper then. Barney is captured trying to enter Lutha and put before a firing squad. Miraculously escaping death he escapes the Austrians by a direct borrowing of Jean Valjean’s escape through the sewers of Paris.
He is temporarily reunited with Emma but then captured by Maenck. Taken to Leopold he is sentenced to death but contrives to escape by exchanging identities with Leopold. In the guise of Leopold Barney manages to save Lutha from the Austrians. He dressed in Royal and Leopold dressed in rages the two are impossible to tell apart which replicates Twain’s story.
Barney is more seriously injured than Leiop[old so more vulnerable and also stupidly trusting. It should be clear that Barney and Leopold are doppelgangers of ERB. The crux of the problme here is the struggle for Emma. She had been promised in marriage to Leopold so that she is unwilling to disengage fromt he agreement without Leopold’s consent.
ERB writes this remarkable passage about his tow identities, the one the loser of yesteryear, Leopold, and the other the success of his present, Barney.
Quote:
‘What do you intend doing with me?” (Leopold) said. “Are you going to keep your word and return my identity?”
“I have promised,” replied Barney, “and what I promise I always perform.”
“Then exchange clothing with me at once,” cried the king, half rising from his cot.
‘Not so fast, my friend,” replied the American. “There are a few trifling details to be arranged before we resume our proper personalities.”
Unquote.
One of the trifling details is the release of Emma from her obligation to Leopold. Barney extorts the letter releasing the king placing it under his pillow. Exhausted from his wound he then falls asleep. Not so tired Leopold waits until Barney is asleep than recovers his clothes takes back the letter and leaves Barney to his fate.
Up to this point in 1913-14’s output ERB has been struggling to make amends with for his dismal performance in the first thirteen yers of marriage and regain her confidence. Thus Leopold represents the old ERB and Barney the new. As Emma has been married to ERB and is familiar with his loser persona it is difficult for her to transit from Leopold to Barney in her affections. As they are so similar in appearance she had difficulty telling them apart. This has been ERB;s dilemma for the last year and a half, convincing Emma that he is trustworthy and will continue to be a good provider.
ERB has confidence in his ability to continue his writing and finanical success but his future was not so clear to Emma as he continued his wastrel ways. As she could not share his optimism she continued to be wary refusing to accord him the trust and actually the respect he desired.
Leopold in possession of the letter identifying him as Barney races to Lustadt presumably with the intent to present Emma with the letter identifying him as Barney, the man she really wants, the marrying her quickly under the false pretense thus foiling Barney.
His own plan is foiled when upon arriving at the castle in Lustadt he is shot dead by Maenck who mistakes him for Barney . Barney then shows up claiming the hand of Emma.
He is then proclaimed king. Emma says to him:
Quote:
“There is no other way, my lord King,” she said with grave dignity. “With her blood your mother requeated you a duty which you may not shirk. It is not for you or me to choose. God chose for you when you were born.”
Unquote.
Thus with the line: God chose for out ERB unites the stories of Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Prince And The Pauper. The Little Prince of ERB’s early years returns to his God appointed place. He and Emma are united.
One believes that the story and its ending was intended for Emma to observe ahd heed. Apparently she didn’t because in the next Tarzan story, Jewels Of Opar of 1915, Tarzan and La flirt again.
Anyway The Mad King sequel rounds out the stories of 1913 bringing Burroughs’ springtime to an end. The tragedy is that Emma couldn’t foresee that ERB had tapped into the Mother Lode. No matter how improvident ERB would continute to be the money would always be there to continue their new life style. Perhaps if she had surrendered to fate and Made ERB her king in fact both she and La would have been united in one figure.
It seems that the Cave Girl, The Eternal Lover and The Mad King explored ERB’s relationship with Emma fromt he beginning to the point aht ERB was minded to replace her with an ideal woman.
The notion would develop in his mind until in 1927 he actually did so.
The three sequels ended the quest of his Springtime. His youthful enthusiasm was exhausted. From this point on he would compose more formal novels searching for story lines.
Personally I find his post 1914 to 1920 work some of his best. The two sequels to The Mucker yet to come are outstanding.
Female problems continued to dominate his work. Then in 1921 he read a work on male-female relations by E.M. Hull that had a profound effect on him. that was the novel of The Sheik. I would like to do a review of that next before I return to the Tarzan series.
Something Of Value I
October 1, 2007
Something Of Value I
by
R.E. Prindle
If a man does away
With his traditional way of living
And throws away his good customs,
He had better first make certain
That he has something of value to replace them.
–Basuto proverb as quoted by Robert Ruark
Dedicated to
Greil Marcus
Part One
One Hundred Years In The Sewers Of Paris
With Jean Valjean.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sigmund Freud
And The Myth Of The Twentieth Century
1.
The Concepts Of The Unconscious And Emasculation
It has been truly said that man does not live by bread alone. He also requires a mythic foundation on which to base his actions. In the neolithic era his mythology was governed by a Matriarchal vision of reality. In the subsequent Egypto-Greco-Mesopotamian mythology the Matriarchal series went through a revision being replaced by an advanced Patriarchal mythological consciousness. This system was followed by the Judaeo-Christian mythological system which endured as the basis of mythological belief until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the belief system was subverted by the emergence of the Scientific Consciousness.
Unlike the mythopoeic consciousness which preceded it the Scientific Consciousness left no place for supernatural explanations; all had to be explained within a rational scientific framework. This placed a great strain on a significant portion of the population which did not have the intellectual equipment to evolve. Thus the basis of psychological comfort provided by religion was destroyed. The code of behavior seemingly sent down from the sky had lost its validity.
In place of an apparent unified consciousness it now became noticeable that EuroAmerican man had an unconscious or subconscious mind as well as a conscious mind. Thus another evolutionary degree of differentiation unfolded that separated the advanced Scientific Consciousness from the anterior Religious Conciousness. A struggle has ensued in which advanced people are compelled to reintegrate their conscious and subconscious minds while the Religious Consciousness divided into the two camps of the Devout and the Reds resist.
The discovery of what was known as the Unconscious began with the emergence from the Religious Consciousness during and after the Enlightenment. Anton Mesmer with his discovery of Animal Magnetism or hypnotism may have been the first stage. Goethe and others carried the discussion forward until the Englishman FWH Myers isolated or identified the subconscious by the name of the unconscius in 1886.
The notion of the unconscious as known during the twentieth century was formulated by Sigmund Freud during the twentieth century’s first decade. Both Myers and Freud misconceived the nature of the sub or unconscious. Myers’ conception was more generous than Freud’s and more in accordance with proto-scientific Patriarchal Greek mythological conceptions which were also mistaken but visionary.
In Myers’ vision of the unconscious it had two aspects: the destructive aspect which he gave the Greek name of Ate and the constructive aspect he termed Menos. Thus he recognized that the unconcious could be good or bad.
Myers’ vision may have been based in Greek mythology. It will be remembered that the creative god, Hephaestus, was married to the emotional goddess, Aphrodite. Hephaestus and Aphrodite had their digs at the bottom of the sea which is to say the symbol of the unconscious which corresponds to the seeming location of the unconscious at the bottom of the mind or, in other words, the brain stem.
Thus it is said that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, which is to say irrationality, emerged from the sea on the half shell.
So, I suppose, love, being never rational is a subconscious decision which is one sided or a half shell. Love may be either constructive or destructive.
Thus also good ideas, a la Hephaestus, seem to rise unbidden from the subconscious or the depths.
Hephaestus and Aphrodite were ancient gods dating back to the Matriarchy. The incoming Patriarchal god, Zeus, had no part in their creation; they were solely a part of Hera the great goddess of the Matriarchy. She was much older than Zeus but the youthful Zeus united with her in the form of a cuckoo bird who as she clutched it to her breast slipped down her dress and ravaged her. So the Patriachy subsumed the Matriarchy.
When Hephaestus later sided with his mother against Zeus, the great Olympian threw him from heaven laming him. Then Aphrodite was given to him to wife. Unbridled lust combined with creative activity, Ate and Menos.
Aphrodite was not happy with the lamed god. While Hephaestus was on trips to Olympus she dallied with another Matriarchal god, Ares, the symbol of uncontrollable desire or rage. Hephaestus having been informed of Aphrodite’s infidelity set a trap for her and Ares. He constructed a finely meshed net of gold which he suspended over his bed.
Aphrodite, unbridled lust, and Ares, uncontrollable rage, were literally caught in the act being unable to disengage. Thus we have two aspects of Ate, lust and rage, caught by the efforts of creativity in the depths of the sea or the unconscious
Hephaestus called the other gods to witness. Athene, a new Patriarchal goddess who was the counterpart and antithesis of Ares and Aphrodite turned away in disgust. Apollo, another new Patriarchal god and the antithesis of Hermes just laughed. Hermes, the patron god of thieves, a Matriarchal god, said he would change places with Ares in a second. Thus, lust, rage and dishonesty are combined in one figure of Ate in the subconscious.
The image of Ate and Menos is what Myers meant by his idea of the unconscious. Freud, on the other hand, understood the unconscious as pure Ate.
Both the Greeks and Myers attempted scientific explanations while Freud gave the unconscious a religious and supernatural twist. He seemed to believe that the unconscious has an independent existence outside the mind of man which is beyond man’s control while being wholly evil.
Opposed to morality, Freud then wished to unleash this conception of the unconscious on the world. He was uniquely prepared to do so. All he had to do was manipulate the symbols of psychoanalysis of which he had full control. The question then is did Freud have deeper understandings that he concealed in order to bring about his desired ends?
Such is the case with his conceptions of sexuality. There is no need for him to have had deeper understanding, after all he was a pioneer opening a new field of inquiry. On the other hand…
Defining the unconscious was done by many men preceding Freud so that his is only one of many understandings, not necessarily the best, although today in common belief he invented the concept of the unconscious.
Next he chose to define the concepts of sex. He was equally successful in this field as far as the public was concerned, although I differ in understanding the matter as I do with the unconscious.
In analyses with patients Freud discovered that there was a fear of castration out of all proportion to actual incidents of sexual mutilation. It follows then that castration symbolizes something other than the removal of the genitals. I contend that it was impossible for Freud to have missed the signficance of castration as a symbol.
Castration as a symbol represents the broader concept of Emasculation, in this case psychological emasculation. This does occur in everyone’s life in many different manifestations while being something to really fear or avoid. Unless I am mistaken all neuroses and psychoses depend from it.
Understanding Emasculation is as much a ‘royal road to the unconscious’ as dreams.
I do not accept Freud’s map of the mind but we both agree that the Ego or Animus is the key to identity. Freud fully understood the significance of the Ego. Thus when the Ego is challenged with an affront or insult to which it is either unable or doesn’t know how to respond to successfully emascualtion to some degree takes place. There is no unconscious, just as there are no instincts so that a fixation is suppressed in the subconscious as a result of the affront. These fixations produce effects, which can be grouped in categories such as hysteria, paranoia, obsessive-compulsiveness and the whole panoply of general affects. The affects then find expression physically and psychologically, or in another word, psychosomatically. The mind and the body is one unit. These affects answer to what Freud called neuroses and psychoses.
When the Ego or Animus is denied its right to assertion the denial is frequently espressed in a hysterically sexual manner corresponding to the the insult. If the victim feels he has been taken from behind he will undoubtedly resort to anal intercourse as one type of underhanded response in an attempt to get back his own as in the case with homosexuality. Homosexuality is Emasculation par excellence.
The human mind is very limited in its inventiveness so all these affects can be catalogued and matched with the insult so that, absent resistance under analysis, they can easily be addressed and exorcised. The problem is not as complicated as it has been made out.
Freud understood so much more than he was willing to tell the goys but then he was not a scientist but a Jewish prophet. In his Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego to which we will return he gave the game away.
The individual can and does submerge his own ego into a, or at various times, many group egos. Prominent among these group egos are ethnic, national and religious group egos.
Just as the individual can be emascualted so can ethnic, national or religious groups be emasculated which the individual will share. I mention the Jews only as the most obvious case although Negroes, American Indians or any defeated people suffer emasculation to one degree or another.
Thus I will discuss the unconscious from a general point of view with Freud’s concept prominent while the concept of Emascultion will be discussed by my understanding based on the studies of Freud on the castration complex and group psychology.
Bear in mind that I think Freud criminally distorted scientific knowledge for ethnic, national and religious ends.
2.
Quo Vadis?
Born with an integrated mind, circumstances soon disintegrate the personality so that the mind must be reintegrated to return to a state of psychic wholeness. A sort of personal mythology is created by one’s early disintegrative experiences which form one’s dreamscape in an attempt to deal with an overwhelming reality. However, when a person gains some control over external reality when the personality is integrated and the initial dreamscape based on early memories is eliminated a sort of distressing vacuum ensues that exists until a new dreamscape is formed which, while sufficient to ease the discomfort lacks the depth and substance of the fully mythologized dreamscape of childhood. One had reached a scientific consciousness. It may not be as satisfying but it fills the space while not controlling one’s behavior.
Western man, Euroamerican man, as the only segment of mankind so differentiated had then to begin to work out a new mythology based on rational scientific ideas. In other words he had to create a comfortable basis from which to understand and interpret the world.
Thus after a couple proto-mythographies in the early nineteenth century a cluster of writers or neo-mythographers began to create a mythology for the Scientific Consciousness.
The destruction of the Religious Consciousness began to become obvious after the eighteenth century Industrial Revolution in England. With the advent of steam the problem began to become acute.
The proto-mythologers may be Walter Scott, Byron, Peacock and the Shelleys. There is a departure in feel and style with these writers. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein posits the scientific problem laying a foundation for the new mythology but does not itself deal with the psychological effects.
The first mythographer to make an attempt to explain the split consciousness from my own researches was the American, Edgar Allan Poe, 1801-49.
Poe began his writing career as a psychologically troubled man ending it insane. Along the way he wrestled with the problem of the void in the subconscious created by the elimination of the supernatural. His message was received by the later group of mythographers who read him without exception all being influenced by his work.
Poe caught the great intellectual change as it emerged. The period from 1830-1880 was the period of the great initial scientific advances that would change the world. From Poe’s death in 1849 to the emergence of the new breed of mythographers beginning in the 1880s was a period of literary quiescence.
Poe began his influential masterpiece The Murders In The Rue Morgue with the paragraph:
Quote:
As the strong man exhibits his physical ability, delighting in such excercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in the moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his intellect into play. He is fond of enigmas, conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension as praeternatural. His results brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have in truth the whole air of intuition.
Unquote.
By analysis Poe didn’t mean the sort of educated guesswork that had passed for analysis in the pre-scientific consciousness. No, this was scientific analysis that disassembled a problem into the component parts revealing the secret than reassembling the problem to its original state.
In doing so Poe revealed himself as a master mythographer as well as a scientist. In C. August Dupin, the initials spell cad, Poe created the archetype of the eccentric madman who would be the here of countless novels. As a projection of Poe’s own mentality Dupin and his unnamed alter ego live in a dilapidated house. The house is the psychological symbol for self which Poe used almost to exhaustion. As the Fall of the House of Usher prefigured Poe’s own descent into insanity as to a number of alter egos representing his sane side figure in the House of Usher, William Wilson, Rue Morgue and most notably in the System of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether in which his sane alter ego drops his other half off at the door of an insane asylum.
The two Dupins live in a darkened house during the day, creaking not unlike the House Of Usher, going out only into the depressed asylum of the night.
Poe thus presents the separation of the conscious and subconscious modern man in the riddle of the murders in the Rue Morgue. In the Rue Morgue the subconscious is represented by the Orang u tang or animal side of human nature while the conscious is represented by the sailor owner. From Poe to at least Freud the subconscious was popularly considered a dangerous wild side of man.
In Dupin and his alter ego versus the sailor and the Orang, Poe may have perceived the emergence of a new species much as H.G. Wells was to do at the end of the century. Thus both men perceived that the antecedent consciousness and the Scientific Consciousness were not just matters of learning but a genetic difference although they didn’t put it that way that couldn’t be bridged.
Both aspects were brought out brilliantly by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) in his 1880 novel: The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. This book may properly be said to be the first true represention of the scientific myth.
In this case the good Dr. Jekyll is the disciplined, self-controlled scientist committed to doing good in the world. Beneath his intelligent exterior he feels the primitive wild man lurking. The primitive of what is in fact a predecessor Homo Sapiens is very very appealing to him. Unable to bring this aspect of his psychology to the surface by conventional means he resorts to drugs.
Having once freed his wild side, who he names Mr. Hyde, he is unable to put Hyde back into the bottle or syringe, whichever the case may be. Hyde assumes control of the personality which leads both aspects of the personality to destruction. This is not unlike Freud’s notion of the unconscious.
Thus Stevenson brilliantly prefigured the twentieth century future in which the scientist is dragged back to the level of the predecessor species through a psychological inability to take the great leap forward and turn his back on his past.
The same sense of the alienation from a predecessor existence was evidenced in the work of a great transitional figure, H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925). Let me say that Haggard is a much neglected literary figure. As his topics concerned Esoterica and Africa, the former which is scorned and the latter ignored, his literary reputation has been allowed to virtually disappear. Having read a large part of his work in the pursuit of these studies I would rank Haggard very highly, certainly among the top ten authors, possibly as high as number five. one and two are Walter Scott and Balzac, while Dumas holds down third and possibly Trollope in the fourth spot. Haggard is a writer of genius.
He spent his late teens and early twenties in the South African provinces of Natal and Zululand where he acquired a vision of the difference between the first Homo Sapiens, the Negro, and the current scientific man. As the saying goes, there’s something to be lost and something gained when you move up the ladder.
Haggard never made it to scientific man himself being stuck in the Religious Consciousness. He belonged to the Esoteric side rather than the Christian. In the third novel of his great African trilogy, Allan Quatermain, Haggard examined the difference between the African and European in this manner.
Quote:
Ah! this civilization what does it all come to? Full forty years and more I spent among savages, and studied them and their ways; and now for several years I have lived here in England, and in my own stupid manner have done my best to learn the ways of the children of light; and what do I find? A great gulf fixed? No, only a very little one, that a plain man’s thought may spring across. I say that as the savage is, so is the white man, only the latter is more inventive, and possesses a faculty of combination…but in all essential the savage and child of civilization are identical.
Unquote.
In the same book Haggard also put the problem more poetically:
…he dreams of the sight
of Zulu impis
breaking on the foe
like surf upon the rocks
and his heart rises in rebellion
against the strict limits
of the civilized life.
Here Haggard states the central thesis of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. In the evolution of the species there is always a small gulf between two adjacent species: nature does not take great leaps, it moves in small increments. Thus it may be a small leap between the two, expecially when the next transition creates not only a new variety but a new species, but the leap is backwards as in Jekyll’s case while it is impossible for Hyde to make the leap forward, nor is he capable of adjusting to the new strict limits. Wasn’t Stevenson precocious?
Haggard who was not of the Scientific Consciousness was left behind while his work formed the basis of the greatest of the scientific mythographers.
Before moving on let us here consider the patron saint of the future Red/Liberal aspect of the Religious Consciousness, the Frenchman, Victor Hugo (1802-85).
Paris Is A Leaky Basket
Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries and its circulation, which is slime minus its human form.
~Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
As Haggard was a transitional figure for the mythographers one might say that Victor Hugo created the literary foundation for the Red/Liberal faction of the Religious Consciousness. His Les Miserables with its tragi-comic format forms the bedrock of Revolutionary beliefs. Hugo was himself a Revolutionary. His novel Les Miserables is the account, so he says, of the apotheosis of Jean Valjean from bestiality to salvation. Along the way to his apotheosis Valjean makes a detour through the sewers of Paris.
Hugo was a poet; his account of the sewers of paris is, shall we say, poetic. In fact a scatalogical masterpiece worthy of our own Lenny Bruce. If Lenny had studied Vic a little he would have been able to say everything he wanted to say while staying out of jail at the same time.
One wonders whether Freud read Hugo. There are certain similarities in style. Certainly they both seem to have had the same notion of the unconscious. Valjean’s trip through the sewers of Paris, he with the bleeding Marius on his back must have been intended as a representation of the unconscious. And a very funny one at that.
Freud would certainly have agreed with Hugo when the latter wrote: The history of men is the history of cloacae. From Hugo’s description of the sewers of Paris it is clear that Paris was not anal retentive.
Freud was no less scatological in his approach to psychology than this astonishing section of Hugo’s book. Who wouldn’t be miserable down in a sewer; miserable enough if only your mind was in the sewer. In Hugo one gets the same macabre, morbid sense of humor Freud exhibits in his own work. Oh yes, read properly Freud tells a lot of jokes. Didn’t he write a book titled: Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious? Sure he did. Knew what he was talking about too.
The first chapter of the section of Hugo’s book, The Intestines Of Leviathan is a series of morbid one liners which are as funny as anything Lenny Bruce came up with. Double entendre? To say Paris is a leaky basket! In the underworld homosexual argot of Jean Genet the term basket refers to a man’s crotch and penis. Undoubtedly the same argot was current in Hugo’s time. He was a student of criminal argot. So Paris being a leaky basket is equivalent to saying Paris was incontinent, pissing all over itself. Don’t you think that’s funny?
And then: “The sewer is the conscience of the city.” Hm? ‘This can be said for the garbage dump, that it is no liar.” I ask you, does Victor Hugo know how to get down and boogie? Let us follow Jean Valjean into the “Conscience of Paris” “which is no liar” from which Hugo says Villon talks to Rabelais. Fabulous funny images, morbid but fabulous and funny.
To be sure, psychology in 1862 when Les Miserables was published, had not been developed, yet notice how closely Hugo’s tongue-in-cheek, laughing in his sleeve, description of Jean Valjean’s journey through the pitch black maze of this subterranean worker’s paradise into which from time to time faint glimmerings of light enter answers to the images of Freudian Depth Psychology. Depth psychology? Was that a pun or play on words?
Just imagine Jean Valjean as he enters the sewer. Take time to construct concrete images in your mind. After this, shall we say, harrowing of hell not unlike that of Theseus and Peirithous, from which Perithous never returned, Valjean receives his apotheosis not unlike Hercules. One might also compare this scene with the temptation of Christ.
Valjean is carrying the bleeding Marius on his back who might or might not be dead. Hugo doesn’t let us know. This might be compared to one’s old self before or during the integration of the personality. In fact Valjean sheds Marius after emerging from the sewer from which the gatekeeper of Hell, Thenardier, allows him to emerge after being paid his obol.
The sewer is certainly a symbol of the unconscious for the scatological Freud who seems to revel in such fecal images. Amidst a chatty history of the sewers of Paris which Hugo keeps up as Valjean plods through the darkness always intuitively heading in the right direction, down. He evades the thought police who are searching for him or someone just like him in the sewers. A shot sent blindly down his gallery grazes his cheek. Jesus! Isn’t a man safe from harassment in the depths of his own mind? If you think Paris is dangerous, try the sewers.
Valjean is exhausted from his long walk carrying Marius on his back, poor suffering humanity, the sign of the cross, nevertheless with the heart of a lion he plods on. He moves forward through deepening fluids as his bare feet sink into fecal matter “which does not lie” while Hugo carries on a charming separate conversation with we readers about little known facts of the Paris sewers. No, the fecal matter, as well as Hugo, tells the truth however hard that may be to decipher from the material at hand as well as underfoot.
As the fluid (also however that may be composed as Hugo is writing scatologically) rises, his feet sink up to his knees into “the conscience of the city.” Get this! Valjean is one of the great strongmen, he lifts the dead weight of Marius above his head on his extended arms still sucking his feet from the muck. Hugo does not reveal whether Valjean lost his shoes during this ordeal or not but surely a while back. Perhaps of all the details Hugo records this particular item which consumes my interest had none for him.
Nevertheless, heedless of the the danger to her shoes, Valjean plods on. Plod, plod.
Now, here’s a detail of interest Hugo does record. Feet and legs deep in the conscience of paris, Marius held above his head visualize this, the fecal fluid had risen above Valjean’s mouth and nose so that he has to tip his head back, I’m not sure this would have been effective, until only a mask can be seen rising eerily above the surface, as well as two arms and Marius. He ain’t heavy, he’s my other self. Seen in Stygian darkness that is.
If we’re all in the same sewer here imagine particles of the conscience of Paris, scatologically know as turds, bumping up against the mask probably trailing behind Our Man Of The Sewer in a wake of fetid glory.
Even in the pitch black Thenardier is watching this spectacle. Fortunately the psychic crisis is past. Valjean leaves the conscience of Paris which does not lie, you can say that about it, behind striking solid, er, ground.
A striking vision of Freud’s and the Revolution’s reality. Had Valjean been given the name Spartacus the Revolutionary vision would have been complete. The Red/Liberals had spent a hundred years or more in the sewers of Paris before they turned this primary text of theirs into the Broadway musical of Les Miserables. Next time you see it put it into this context of the sewers of Paris. The songs will take on new meaning.
Part II of Something Of Value I follows.
Lipstick Traces Pt. IX: Greil Marcus
September 11, 2007
A Review
Lipstick Traces:
Greil Marcus
Part IX
Into The Abyss
It sounded like a lot of fun wrecking the world.
It felt like freedom.
Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces
It is probably time to look a little into Mr. Marcus’ antecedents. He was born in the summer of 1945 between VE and VJ day as he tells us. He was ten, then, in 1954-55 when Rock and Roll came into existence. He doesn’t seem to imply that he was particularly interested in records in the next decade that would have made him twenty in 1964-65. He would have been 15 to 20 from 1960-65 during which time he would have listened to the radio. He also seems to have been in Philadelphia at some time during that period when he attended a Bob Dylan concert. I haven’t read yet where he mentioned that he had a record collection during that period. He doesn’t seem to recall much from memory before 1965 with the possible exception of Bob Dylan.
One is forced to conclude then that most if not all his record lore was acquired between his twentieth and thirtieth years from 1965 to 1974-75. He began his career as a critic in 1966 when he went to work for Rolling Stone. He left that post a year later to write for Creem Magazine. His first book Mystery Train was published in 1975 so he should have acquired his lore over maybe eight years.
He should have been a sophomore in ’64 which means he should have graduated in’66 so his real record education would have been from ’66 to ’74. Not much time for someone posing as an expert in ’75.
He says he was born in San Francisco moving into Menlo Park in 1955 so that he went to Menlo Park-Atherton High. The area is one of the ritziest in the Bay Area. Atherton is top of the line for the Bay so his step-father must have been doing pretty well. In other words Mr. Marcus is a rich kid. I haven’t read exactly where he lived between 1948 when his mother remarried and 1955.
At any rate he comes from a very well to do background. After graduating from MPA he went over to Berkeley to attend UC. He was there for the whole Free Speech brouhaha. At some time after graduation from UC he returned to Berkeley to live which is his home base at the present time.
At the time he wrote Mystery Train I would question the depth and breadth of his knowledge.
He published Mystery Train at the last possible moment such a book could be published. From ’66 to ’75 those of us concerned with records were convinced that something monumental and earth shaking was happening. Wonderful theories of the music’s importance were spun of which Mystery Train is one. I think it probable that Mr. Marcus saw a string of such books rolling off his pen. A funny thing happened on the way to the forum however. Disco and Punk blew up the Rock monolith about the same year destroying the grandiose notions we were all believing in. All of a sudden as Mr. Marcus points out confidence was destroyed and survival became the issue. Mr. Marcus and his plans were thrown for a loop.
Not until 1989 did he find another tack to try to get back on track. In that year he published Lipstick Traces. Feeling that his first career had been blown out of the water by Punk he paid homage to it by concentrating on Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. Broadening out some he incorporated the history of what he considered various Dada movements. His concern with Dada had found expression in Mystery Train so it was only necessary to relate Dada to Punk with which he had no trouble.
Since ’89 he has published a continuous series of books, the most recent being The Shape Of Things To Come.
2.
I hesitate to do this but I feel the reader should know something of my credentials to give some basis for judging my criticism and analysis.
I’m about seven years older than Mr. Marcus having been born in 1938. I was therefore sixteen in 1954 which is more or less the cut off date for the beginning of Rock and Roll.
I grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. We were apparently out of the mainstream of Rock development. Even though we had a fairly large Black population there was no Rhythm And Blues or Black music on the local radio. There were only traditional music shows on radio in 1954 when Top Forty was in embryo. By ’55 and ’56 we had full fledged Top 40 and what a blast it was.
With Top 40 came Black artists like Bill Doggett, Fats Domino and Little Richard but they were a Top 40 sound whether they called it Rhythm And Blues or not. One could tune into Detroit for Black records but I didn’t know anyone who did. I tuned in a couple times but Black music per se repelled me.
I was in the class of ’56. The class of ’55 knew nothing of Rock and Roll at the time and very little of Top 40 radio. I was in a distinct minority in the class of ’56 who listened to Rock at all. The class of ’57 was the first class attuned to the music.
As to first R & R records, who knows? The early and mid-fifties were a blend of musics so I heard a fair amount of Swing. Anyone who traces Rock and Roll directly to Swing is dreaming. I know Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa and the Swing drummers. None of them had the R&R feel. Swing rhythm sections were miniscule compared to Rock which to my mind is a singer, lead guitar and a two or three piece rhythm section. Very faint resemblance to Swing.
When it became financially impossible for Big Band to survive I suppose the instrumental quartet was the next logical step which led to the Big Beat. Neither Elvis nor Sun had a Big Beat. He had rhythm but no beat; he was essentially a hillbilly singer doing fast songs which is how everyone thought of him. That’s what I heard and none of the people I knew would listen to him because he was a hillbilly. As far as I’m concerned the Big Beat was developed by Lonnie Donegan and that is where the English Beat groups come from. Lonnie’s early stuff was as much Rock as anything else although he was primarily a terrific Folk and Blues singers. Unparalleled. He was as good as Elvis but somewhat more traditional sounding than Presley. Elvis could really move you.
Elvis was virtually unknown in Saginaw before Heartbreak Hotel. I missed out on the Sun records by a day. The record store had returned them the day before I got there so I have all RCAs. I never knew anyone else who had heard of Elvis between the time I bought my 45s and Heartbreak Hotel.
I never thought of Elvis as a Rock and Roller on those early records. There really was no Rock and Roll except for Bill Haley And The Comets and that stuff was really leadfooted. I didn’t really enjoy Rock Around The Clock and I never bought it. Elvis was just a hillbilly cat who could really sing a song. I knew from reading the labels that Arthur Crudup wrote That’s All Right Mama but that meant nothing to me. Who ever heard of Arthur Crudup?
I don’t understand why I don’t have Sun Presleys as I bought every Sun record as it came out. I had to have them special ordered as nobody wanted them but I was very familiar with the Sun sound. Not impossibly Sam Phillips had as much to do with Rock and Roll as anyone because all the records he produced had that forward leaning scudding way. You could have substituted Elvis for Johnny Cash on Get Rhythm and there wouldn’t have been much difference.
When Elvis left Sun his production values changed with the sound becoming flat footed and vertical rather than forward leaning. Elvis was always Elvis for me but I never had the incentive to buy his RCA produced 45s.
Some may say the music died with Buddy Holly’s plane crash but that is a gross exaggeration. Holly’s career was virtually over by February ’59. He was singing solo and fading fast. The Big Bopper was a no one who had one trash talking record while Richie Valens was as close to a zero as you can get.
Elvis was kept alive by RCA during his Army years but Little Richard was finished after Heebie Jeebies and Jerry Lee’s Rock career was stalled. High School Confidential was so-so. Jerry Lee’s marriage to his cousin may have put him in bad odor in some quarters but that was a fishing expedition to discredit him. Might have hurt his personal appearances but not his record sales, they were already down. To my mind Duane Eddy came out with Rebel Rouser on the heel of the plane crash and Rock and Roll bounced right along without missing a beat. Apparently not too many people remember the effect of Eddy and Rebel Rouser but it was the second kick in the pants after Presley. Kept us all going.
The big problem for Rock and Roll was Organized Crime. The Mafia and Chicago Outfit controlled Juke boxes. Those idiots determined that only their acts got on the Juke boxes. If you want a good representation of what the record industry was like check out the best Rock and Roll movie ever made- The Girl Can’t Help It. If you watch closely and pay attention you are being told exactly how it was.
An Outfit figure greatly resembling Al Capone, although the time period was long after Capone, controls the Juke boxes for the Outfit. That means the Juke boxes at least West of the Appalachians to the Coast. The Juke boxes in Saginaw were stocked by the Outfit that for all practical purposes controlled the town. All towns.
Girl Can’t Help It stars Jayne Mansfield and Tommy Ewell. Mansfield is the Mafia figure’s moll. He wants to make her a record star which he figures he can do because he controls the Juke boxes. All of ’em. But the Girl Can’t Sing. The producers are at their wits ends because they have to do something with her. They accidentally discover that she has this high pitched squeal. So, a la Tequila in which periodically the instrumental music stops and someone announces ‘Tequila’, at certain points in the record the music stops and Mansfield squeals. This is so captivating the record does become a hit.
Now, the movie highlights several Mafia acts like Teddy Randazzo and the Gum Drops that would never draw anyone into the theatres. Teddy didn’t even have an attractive high pitched squeal to go along with his great accordion playing. But as is usual with non-record types the belief is that if you can expose non-talent acts to enough people they will sell. So the Outfit did understand they needed some draws to get people in to expose the non-talent. Who are you going to go to? Well, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard for starters. I went because of Gene Vincent.
The movie was released in ’58 so not many of us had ever actually seen any of these guys. The Mob had their draws but they wanted to showcase the Italian acts which they did. Gene Vincent was shot through the window of a recording studio for about half of Be Bop A Lula; Eddie Cochran did his Twenty Flight Rock shot off a TV set and Little Richard was shot through a crowd in a club about fifty feet away.
As I say if you pay attention you can get a very good idea of what was going on. Mansfield and Ewell were great but they were at the terminal point of their careers.
The early sixties were pretty duddy as far as I was concerned, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I was right, so I went back to my true love, Country and Western. As I noted in Part One I was drawn back into pop by my brother-in -law. As I said I then graduated from college in ’66 going up to Oregon from the Bay Area. It was there in ’67 that I opened a record store. From ’67 to ’80 I was a decent sized player in the record business. I thought I heard everything but I am always amazed at the records for which I have no recollection even seeing.
I was there when the first Rolling Stone came out. I don’t know where the magazine sold but it wasn’t Oregon. Pretty boring actually. Got worse as time went on and then it got Political.
I quit listening to records in 1980 when I closed my record store. Punk was too ridiculous to waste your time on although I do have two or three Disco records I value. Well, Rock and Roll was great while it lasted but it really did die in ’75. Not only Punk and Disco but the untalented Epigone came along. The splitting out of Heavy Metal as a genre didn’t help either. God! I know how Marcus felt. Everything just crashed to the ground.
3.
Mr. Marcus’ themes and direction remain the same from Mystery Train to The Shape Of Things To Come. His attitudes are controlled by his dual Israeli and American passports: his Semitism and anti-Semitism. These two citizenships coincide in his psyche with his twin racial concerns. The Israeli citizenship as Semitism and his American citizenship with anti-Semitism. Naturally his Israeli Semitism takes precedence in his loyalty over his American anti-Semitism. Americans are Nazis in his mind. As with Adam in the Garden of Paradise and God, the twin concepts exist side by side in his mind with Adam representing Semitism and God anti-Semitism. Thus his Jewish/Adamic/Israeli identity represents his absolute purity in his mind while America/God represent his foul or Devil side. He and his fellow Jews think that by trashing the Garden, Europe, Palestine, America or wherever they happen to reside that their ‘purity’ will triumph and they will be as they represent themselves: a Holy People suited to govern mankind, Judge-Penitents. That is what the eighteenth century messiah, Jacob Frank, meant by saying that if the Jews commited all the evil in their minds then this ‘purity’ will shine to light the way for the peoples. You don’t have to be Freud to know it ain’t going to work. Thus Mr. Marcus’ subliminal message is all good comes from Jewish musicians and all evil from American musicians. The Jewish Bob Dylan becomes his ultimate hero taking precedence over the American anti-hero, Elvis Presley.
That’s why in Lipstick Traces he juxtaposes the anti-hero Presley and the Jewish hero Isidore Isou.
Mr. Marcus scatters several clues throughout his work to hint at what he’s attempting. He mentions John Ford’s movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and one of its morals a couple times concentrating on the movie’s stated notion that once an event becomes legendary even though the received version may be untrue people prefer the myth to the fact. There may be some truth to the notion although as Mr. Marcus explores the counter notion of detournement he gives us the means to strip such an ingrained notion from the story and turn it in any direction we want. Thus in the twenties the Judaeo-Communists on the one hand debunked American heroes and myths while at the same time detourning them so that Jefferson and Lincoln become founding members of Communism as Communism in turn becomes Twentieth Century Americanism. A neat trick that didn’t quite work.
Actually the two practices denote the transition from one religion to another which also lays bare Mr. Marcus’ intent. Thus in the first few centuries of the Piscean Age the Catholic Church detourned ancient Taurian and Arien religious sites by stripping them of their pagan connotations replacing the meaning with little balloons containing Christian messages. Eventually they replaced Arien temples with Piscean churches.
Jack Finney’s 1950’s novel The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers describes the same thing in which aliens while maintaining exact replicas of the bodies they take over inform the minds with entirely different content. Finney understood detournement completely long before Guy Debord had it figured out.
That is exactly what the Jews, who are attempting to replace Christianity are doing. Mr. Marcus mentions Philip Roth’s The Plot To Destroy America approvingly. Of course Mr. Marcus and Roth are both Jewish. In Roth’s detournement of American history he portrays the Jewish rescue of the true America, which the Jews in their wisdom created, from the Weird Old Americans who are trying to twist the Promised Land into some Nazi hate filled paranoid perversion of what one is led to believe was the American paradise Jews had created.
Roth chooses to recklessly defame Charles Lindhberg, a great and true American, but that is what detournement is all about. Thus on the one hand Roth detournes ‘Weird Old American’ heroes into villains while at the same time creating the myth of the Jewish saviors a la Liberty Valence.
The Jews then become the men who shot Liberty Valence thus destroying the Weird Old America while bringing into existence this Jewish paradise we enjoy today. Shut your mouth, you anti-Semite.
Why Liberty Valence?
Well, Liberty is the opposite of collectivity or the Jewish Law. He represents the sort of ‘rugged individualism’ that threatened Jewish collectivity or subordination to the Mosaic Law. Valence means valour, courage or valiance. That is, a man who has what it takes to stand out against the crowd or Mosaic Law. I’m sure it was an unintended compliment. No one of the collectivity has what it takes to stand up against him, not even the hero of the collectivity, John Wayne.
The legend that is so hard to kill is that Jimmie Stewart shot Liberty Valance down in a fair and square man to man fight. Actually Wayne is the agent of the collectivity who bushwhacked Liberty from a dark alley, Wayne and his Negro servitor and alter ego who tossed his rifle to him.
So this is the secret message of Lipstick Traces creating a legend and detourning existing beliefs that run counter to those of the collectivity. For that reason the branch of academic history known as American Studies has been captured by Jews who stand up laughingly epatering the Americans, debunking and detourning as they go.
I see where Mr. Marcus and a yoyo by the name of Todd Gitlin are joining forces to epater the Americans together. Ought to be funny if you’ve got the right sense of humor.
4.
All the seeds of Mr. Marcus later work are apparent in his 1975 Mystery Train. One should examine Mr. Marcus construction of Train carefully.
He examines six recording stars. Two of which he calls ancestors and four ‘Inheritors.’ The six are Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, Dylan/The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley.
Out of the period of 1950-75 Mr. Marcus chooses a very personal list of bands. One would call the list debateable but there’s not much to debate. Whether they are supposed to be important or influential isn’t clear. Apart from Presley none of them were overwhelming important or influential. Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, the Doors? No, they aren’t on board Mr. Marcus’ Mystery Train. So, what do we have?
The list is bracketed by two White performers, Harmonica Frank and Elvis Presley. Robert Johnson and Sly Stone are Black. Dylan/The Band are Jewish and Canadian while Robbie Robertson is mentioned as having a Jewish father. Thus Dylan/The Band and Randy Newman are two Jewish outfits. Two Whites, two Blacks, two Jews. Obviously we have an agenda here.
The two ancestors are questionable. I may have a vague memory of having heard the name Harmonica Frank but the man influenced absolutely no one. Technically he is no ancestor. His only connection with, say, Elvis, is that both were produced by Sam Phillips at Sun records. In that sense Harmonica Frank may be representative of what Phillips as a producer was trying to do but that represents Phillips and not Harmonica Frank.
Thus when Phillips decided to produce Presley he used the same musical tenets or ‘ear.’ Elvis was very fortunate to have Phillips to hear his talent and draw him out. Without Phillips there would never have been an Elvis Presley other than this guy driving a truck.
As far as ‘White’ ancestors go Phillips would have been more appropriate than Frank. I suppose what I am saying is that I find Mr. Marcus either too shallow or too tendentious.
Mr. Marcus doesn’t use a Jewish ancestor but as a Black ancestor he chooses Robert Johnson. As he states there were no Robert Johnson recordings available for anyone to hear before the 1960 Columbia release. Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbettor would have been a much more influential ancestor. Not only had his recordings been continuously available but his songs formed a staple for Folk artists from the post-war years on. His Good Night Irene and Midnight Special were ten times more influential than anything Robert Johnson ever wrote, a hundred times…heck, a thousand times, more. Johnson’s songs began to appear by other artists only in late sixties.
Mr. Marcus’ enthusiasm for Johnson’s lyrics is absolutely inexplicable. He quotes the following as an example of Johnson’s genius:
Me and the devil, was walking side by side
Oooo, me and the devil was walking side by side.
I’m going to beat my woman until I get satisfied.
Pretty choice stuff, huh? I’m surprised the ladies haven’t boycotted both Johnson and Mr. Marcus’ Mystery Train.
Nevertheless his choice of Johnson seems arbitrary at the best and tendentious at the worst.
I presume he chose the Band because of their association with Bob Dylan. Mr. Marcus definitely sets Dylan up as the greatest of the era replacing Presley. This is patently ridiculous.
His final paragraph detournes Elvis in favor of Dylan. Bear in mind that in 1975 Elvis still had two years to live so Mr. Marcus may be understood to be addressing Presley indirectly:
Quote:
All in all there is one remaining moment I want to see; One epiphany that would somehow bring his (Elvis’) story home. Elvis would take the stage as he always has; the roar of the audience would surround him, as it always will. After a time, he would begin a song by Bob Dylan, singing slowly. Elvis would give it everything he has. “I must have been mad,” he would cry, “I didn’t know what I had- until I threw it all away.”
And then with love in his heart, he would laugh.
Unquote.
That’s a pretty tale. As a detournement the kingof rock n’ roll passes the scepter to Dylan. While as a hypnotic suggestion to the living Elvis Mr. Marcus is attempting to bring his dream to come to pass. We’ll never know if it would have worked but it was the traditional Judaeo-Freudian method.
Thus the two sections on Harmonica Frank and Elvis are slurs on Mr. Marcus’ concept of The Weird Old America. That title of another of his books is itself a detournement of America.
For the last few years I have been wavering but after reading Mr. Marcus’ ideas on Dylan I have probably irrevocably turned against him. To write of the Band is to write of Dylan. Dylan would always have been Dylan but the Band would never have been anything without Dylan. The Band probably stands to Dylan as Presley does to Sam Phillips.
The first two Band LPs are the result of direct contact with Dylan in the sessions that resulted in the basement tapes. With the separation from Dylan the effect wore off with the Band returning to their R & R roots. At their peak they were no Doors or Led Zeppelin. Like Dylan I find them unlistenable today.
Mr. Marcus wrote a two or three hundred page essay on Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone which he seems to consider the greatest song ever written. He perversely refuses to accept the song for what it is- a hymn to ingratitude. In the song Dylan clearly resents his dependence on Joan Baez for his early success. He, in fact, used her but now in his pride of success he spurns her from him- with his foot so to speak. A real ingrate as a matter of fact.
Mr. Marcus reproduces the lyrics in their entirety as a preface to the book. I’m not going to do the same here but Like A Rolling Stone is in a genre of Dylan songs that can be defined only as mocking or ‘hate songs.’ Along with Rolling Stone one can include Positively Fourth Street, Please, Crawl Out Your Window, Ballad Of A Thin Man, Desolation Row and any number of others. Sooner Or Later, One Of Us Must Know.
Again with Dylan the tone of his voice is more important than the words. For me I responded to the pain and anger in his voice that seemed to reflect my own experiences and which I interpreted in my own way. The same attitude would be reflected differently by the baby boomers born in the early fifties. As noted they came along at the time of Mystery Train’s writing to shatter Mr. Marcus immediate dream of a Rock And Roll Czardom.
One presumes that the song Mr. Marcus wanted Presley to sing in order to detourne himself in favor of Bob Dylan ‘with love in his heart and a laugh’ thus allowing one religious idol to replace another was ‘Like A Rolling Stone.’
Unfortunately due to Mr. Marcus’ interpretation I now see ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as an actual hymn of hate scorning and mocking Joan Baez. Throughout Bob Dylan’s career he had the habit of purloining things of others…said the Joker to the Thief. In Minneapolis and Colorado he actually stole records from other people. His excuse was that he really needed them. In New york he lifted the arrangement of a song of Dave Von Ronk’s and recorded it without permission. He had a ‘good excuse’ for that too. He needed it.
Perhaps his greatest theft was of the career of Joan Baez. Baez out of a generous heart used her influence and reputation to gain acceptance for the caterwauling Dylan. He couldn’t admit this theft without exposing himself as an ingrate subject to the scorn of the Folk community of Greenwich Village. This may possibly be the secret meaning of Positively Fourth Street in which he seems to heap scorn on the whole Folk community.
Mr. Marcus is especially impressed with the disgustingly hateful lines:
Ain’t it hard
When you discover that
He really wasn’t
Where It’s at
After he took from you everything
He could steal?
How does it feel?
How does it feel to be on your own
No direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone.
Dylan has identified the person he is speaking to as ‘Miss Lowly’ who went to a fine school and here he says that he has stolen everything from her that he can steal and then he taunts her as though he had reduced her to his condition when he first arrived in New York City. ‘How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home like a complete unknown?’
Yes. It must have been terrifying for Dylan to arrive in New York City as a complete unknown with no understanding of how to get started, homeless and starving. Dylan solved his problem by scrounging lodging and his next meal. He just moved in on people, ate their food, read their books, listened to their records, picked their minds, stole from them everything he could steal and then turned his back on them. Cut them cold. Scorned them as in Positively Fourth St. Well, all right. OK. But I don’t find it as admirable as Mr. Marcus does. As I say I never really thought of Like A Rolling Stone deeply before reading Bob Dylan At The Crossroads. (Robert Johnson again. Is Mr. Marcus suggesting that Dylan sold his soul to the Devil?) but now that I have I am appalled at the coarseness of actually composing a song about your perfidy and advertising it to the world.
If Mr. Marcus had handed Presley the song saying this is going to be what you’ll sing next, Presley who had perfect musical sense would have said: ‘Not on your life, Baby Blue.’
No laugh and a shrug from the King.
After Dylan/The Band Mr. Marcus moves on to Sly Stone. Sly was not a major talent. He had a couple fair R&B songs bordering on open racism. Sinking rapidly beneath drugs Sly Stone rapidly sunk his career.
Moving next to Randy Newman I must confess that Mr. Marcus has lost me. Perhaps he is trying to help the career of a fellow Semite along. Got me. Newman’s songs were always repulsive to me and Mr. Marcus’ quotes merely make them more repellent. Gee, I wonder why Elvis never sang ‘Short People?’
And then of course we come to what Mr. Marcus intends as his piece de resistance of criticism, Elvis himself. This piece is a regular tear down job.
Mr. Marcus was a trifle too young during the late forties and first half of the fifties to understand the situation. During those years the musical culture was in the hands of Jews and Italians. New York’s Tin Pan Alley from the twenties on had controlled American popular music. The clubs in which artists performed were all mobbed up as all the artists were mobbed up will they nil they. Thus nobody got through who wasn’t thoroughly vetted.
On the fringes one had areas of Black musicians who were outside the scope of popular music hence not worried about. At the same time one had Hillbilly music that was so despised that proper Whites retched at the mere mention of it and that is no exaggeration. Concomitant with Hillbilly although culturally acceptable was Folk music. Postwar from 1946 to 1964 in my estimation Folk was the only listenable pop musical expression. Unfortunately Folk music was in the hands of the Reds making it culturally suspect.
During the twenties and thirties Tin Pan Alley songs were vital enough to satisfy the nation’s listening ear although there were those who complained about it. Whatever had worked for Tin Pan Alley between the wars the ethic had worn too thin between ’46 and ’54. The music was so godawful and stiff that few could listen to it especially the young. Into the Jewish vacuum stepped the Black and Hillbilly songwriters and performers. While Hank Williams may have slipped slightly over the line of pop his songs were welcomed with open arms by pop cover artists. At that time there was no shame in covering a song made popular by another artist, even as the original version was still moving up the charts.
A golden time was created for unvetted performers and songwriters to step into the vacuum. While Eddie Fisher, Ezio Pinza and Mario Lanza and a stable of Italian pop singers attempted to hold the Tin Pan Alley fort Black street singers were emerging as Doo Wop groups while in Memphis Sam Phillips was developing the distinctive Sun Sound of which Elvis was the cornerstone. Elvis and his songs were completely unvetted by Tin Pan Alley and the Mob. As far as I’m concerned Presley’s breakthrough was such a fortunate concatenation of circumstances as to be miraculous. There are few times when things work out so perfectly for all concerned from Sam Phillips to Elvis to Colonel Parker and RCA. While Elvis was the transcendant talent he was only a component in the Elvis Presley success story. He had the good sense to stick to singing while he had the good fortune to be associated with managers of talent, circumspection, genius and above average integrity. So rare as to be almost unbelievable.
Phillips brought the talent to the surface that anyone else would have overlooked. A shy retiring Elvis given the opportunity dug deep to release the inner singer to become a polished singer almost immediately- in fact immediately. All of his Sun singles are absolutely stunning. There was no reason not to be swept off your feet from the first note of That’s All Right Mama.
Elvis’ genius was that he handled songs in a perfect blend of hillbilly and pop. He may have used some songs written by Blacks but there was no Black singer that could possibly have made of those songs what Elvis did.
Greil Marcus, Guralnick and others seem to be of the opinion that something went wrong with Elvis. Nothing went wrong with Elvis; he had the perfect career from his first single to his death in 1977. He was unable to withstand the pressures of his unparalled success. Unable to move in public because of his fans he was virtually under house arrest. For crying out loud, the guy couldn’t even go to McDonald’s. On top of that he aroused the anger and enmity of the ‘greatest generation’, the Mob and if Mr. Marcus is any example, the Jews. I’m sure he had difficulty just staying alive.
His goal was the movies. Thus his singing style changed to fit the venue. As much as I loved the Sun Elvis there is no possible way he could have continued in the same vein and sustained popularity for twenty some odd years. The new Elvis of Heartbreak Hotel and the early RCA years lost me as a record buyer. Still, as Dr. Hook sang: Elvis, he’s a hero, he’s a superstar…. as a hero Elvis always retained my loyalty.
While the Army seemed a disaster, his tour of duty may have been fortuitous for his career. The Army allowed the excitement to abate even as anticipation increased but when he returned it was as a return with a different feel. His style once again changed from the early RCA years. Listening to those old Mario Lanza and Ezio Pinza records inspired him to sing operatic C&W. Rather startling to my ear but with sure musical sensibility it worked for Elvis.
And then his popularity was so immense that he was able to star in two to three movies a year with all of them being money makers. The songs may have been less than memorable but he had to reach a mass audience for which popular music allowed of no vocal eccentricities. His fan base was strong enough and his talent great enough to sustain his popularity through a couple dozen movies that were frequently scorned and mocked but as Mr. Marcus generously points out they offered something that set them apart.
As all things must his movie career passed its ethic and cannily realizing it Elvis moved on. Thus in 1968 he produced a special that catapulted him back to the top of the musical scene. Even Mr. Marcus was overwhelmed by the ’68 transition from movie star back to recording master.
Nor did Elvis stop there but went on to a musical triumph that dwarfed anything that had gone before it including Frank Sinatra’s whole career- that was the satellite transmission form Hawaii to the whole world, the entire planet, simultaneously. The whole world tuned in to Elvis at one time. The equivalent of several hundred Woodstocks and something that has never been equaled by any other performer or groups of performers.
So, what did go wrong? Elvis had an unimaginably perfect career. The tragedy is that the enormous pressures were too great for this amazingly centered performer. It took a lot to beat him down.
Now, Elvis had a popularity that Bob Dylan couldn’t even dream about. Dylan could sing cranky little songs of hatred and viciousness such as Like A Rolling Stone to the ‘abused, confused, misused strung out ones and worse’ but Elvis couldn’t sing such viciousness to a worldwide audience. Imagine Elvis Live from Hawaii singing to a mob of adoring women lines like this:
Aw, you’ve
Gone to the finest school alright Miss Lowly but you know you only used to get
Juiced in it.
Nobody’s ever taught you to live out on the street
And now you’re gonna
Have to get
Used to it.
You say you never
Compromise
With the mystery tramp but now you
Realize
He’s not selling any
Alibis
As you stare into the vacuum
Of his eyes
And say:
Do you want to
Make a deal?
How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To be on your own
With no direction home
A complete unknown…
Pardon me, I’m laughing so hard at the image I’m falling out of my chair. Oops, there I go.
—–
I’m back. Didn’t hurt myself.
So, anyway I consider Mr. Marcus’ whole critique so skewed as to be vitiated. It would take a whole lot of love in Elvis heart to make such a musical gaffe, blowing his career in one misguided song and then say: ‘I didn’t know what I had until I till I threw it all away.’ Sorry Greil, Bob Dylan is actually a minor talent. Let us not forget that he once opened a show for the Rolling Stones.
5.
There was a long hiatus of fourteen years between Mystery Train and the appearance of Lipstick Traces in 1989. During that period one assumes that Mr. Marcus had ‘no direction home.’ How the elements that make up Lipstick Traces formed is open to conjecture. He attributes his direction to one John Rockwell on the dedication page. His style was also apparently heavily influenced by the Firesign Theatre hence the herky jerky, jumpy non-sequitur style. The Firesign Theatre was one of the great recording acts of the late 60s and the 70s, still going too. They have continued to release CDs on into their old age, such as it is, but, as I say, I stopped listening to anything after 1980.
As the Firesign is essential to Mr. Marcus I suspect there is loads of humor in Traces that I’m not getting. Hard enough to make those difficult jumps. Juxtaposing Presley and Isou wasn’t even a jump, it was a gap.
John Rockwell was some sort of music critic at the NYT so not exactly the sort of influence one would want. As Mr. Marcus would have been already familiar with the Frankfurt School of which he is a continuator and mentions Dada in Mystery Train one imagines that critic Rockwell pushed him in the direction of the Presley lookalike Isidore Isou and incidents like the rather obscure Invasion of Notre Dame. Mr. Marcus was five at the time of the Invasion; one doubts he remembers it. Thus, perhaps Mr. Rockwell directed his eyes to the morgue of intriguing but all but forgotten news clippings with which he would have been familiar. Thus Mr. Marcus found the Lettrist/Situationist International.
The Paris disturbance following on the heels of the Free Speech brouhaha would then have given him a focal point. It appears that at some point Mr. Marcus met Debord becoming very well acquainted with the old drunk and pervert, as it were, a disciple. When Debord shot himself through the heart in 1994 as with Drs. Mabuse and Baum Debord’s soul apparently entered Mr. Marcus’ body so that he appears to have assumed leadership of the SI.
Traumatized by the Punkers who he gives credit for bringing down Rock he also became fascinated with Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols as well as several other Punk units. Personally I have always thought Punk was absolutely useless hence I find Mr. Marcus’ fascination with this sub-marginal trash actually objectionable. While his subjects knew that they were nothing and sought to be everything the means they chose to raise their chances of becoming something were ill advised.
However as Mr. Marcus integrates them into the Dada/Lettrist/Situationist program it may be worth considering at least Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols who according to Mr. Marcus are an outgrowth of the SI.
After the failure of the 1968 disturbance in Paris Debord’s SI seems to have become truly international what with Greil Marcus in the US and people like Malcom McLaren and Jamie Reid in England. God only knows how many covert cells there were and what looneys they were allied with.
McLaren and Reid were casting about for some way to epater the bourgeois when McLaren had an interview with the New York Dolls. From them he conceived the notion that no talent was needed at all to become a rock band. One only needed the ability to make noise. Fortunately for Reid and McLaren there were myriads of young losers who felt the same way. One only had to pick and choose the most likely candidates on a cosmetic basis and give their repertoire a Situationist slant. You know, create a situation.
Mr. Marcus wonders from where the musical infuences for the Punkers came. I have to say that their inspiration was largely Bob Dylan. Johnny Rotten (ne Lydon) was born in 1956 so in 1975 he was twenty years old. The Punks then would have been eighteen to twenty-five. A primary influence on them would have been Bob Dylan. Dylan’s first records give the impression of an untutored musician. The stuff was just noisy. He could neither sing nor play.
The mean streak that Mr. Marcus finds so attractive in Like A Rolling Stone runs throughout the corpus. As much as I hate to admit it that hateful mocking derisive attitude is the essence of Dylan’s style. After having Mr. Marcus point this out to me so unmistakably I’m having to rearrange my memories of Bob to change their faces and give them all brand new names. I’m having to become a revisionist of my own history.
While Dylan is a real cultural name dropper so that he gives the impression of being learned, he isn’t. Chronicles proved that. His criticisms of society are merely emotional rants rather than informed or intellectual critiques. That he could wing tripe like Masters of War past what must have been a fairly sophisticated Folk crowd is truly phenomenal. Or, maybe I was wrong about them too.
At any rate the Punkers were merely unhappy with their teenage angst. I can assure you that I and my age cohort were too. If the right social environment had been provided perhaps we would have responded in the same way.
Johnny Rotten could not have had many of the thoughts Mr. Marcus attributes to him, the kid was only nineteen, so one must believe that McLaren and Reid filled in the blanks with Situationese and Rotten rearranged the words. While McLaren and Reid may have turned a few dollars from the act it is difficult to see what else they accomplished.
Society was developing rapidly without their help. The band Devo released their significant LP Are We Not Men? A. We Are Devo that quite clearly reflected the direction in which society was headed.
The amazing thing is that Mr. Marcus can discuss these insignificant nits at such length and with such seriousness. His long discussion of Johnathon Richman’s ‘Roadrunner’ was entirely uncalled for. Neither Richman nor his song had any influence in record circles. The record wasn’t even available for sale.
As Mr. Marcus neither owns up to being in the SI or gives any idea of the direction of the SI and ‘revolutionary’ groups I find that his book while full of interesting details is pointless. I have read the thing five or six times for this review. I have given the book more thought than it deserves. If the intent is a sly joke I don’t find it very funny. If the intent is to recruit members for the SI I find nothing agreable in the organization. I remain unrecruited. As a collection of non-sequiturs I find the book actually unreadable.
If Mr. Marcus modeled himself on the Firesign Theatre his choice was admirable but his execution was execrable. As a historian I’m afraid I would have to grade him below a C. Perhaps the quality of the book is best expressed by the cover.
Why is he nothing when he should be everything?
End Of Review
Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus Part VIII
September 1, 2007
A Review
Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus
Escape From Reality
by R.E. Prindle
One gathers the impression from Mr. Marcus’ work that all his characters are in an extreme flight from reality. This would be equally true of the historical movements he describes of the Begins and Beguines and Free Spirit. His conception of the Free Spirit is a downright denial of reality and a full scale unlimited retreat into fantasy. Coinciding with this is an impossible demand for absolute freedom. The freedom of the Free Spirits, the Dadaist/Lettrist/Situationists and indeed, the Jews in general, is a freedom that requires passive objects- in other words Masters and Slaves. The freedom of the Free Spirits that on one level demanded unlimited sexual gratification for men at the same time required the abuse and degradation of women. Indeed, the image of a woman having sex with ten different men in succession is sexual abuse of a major kind that must irreparably damage the psyche of the woman.
I return again to the striking images of the insane asylum or Maison de Sante of Poe’s The System Of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether. There is a great similarity in that story between the inmates seizing control of the asylum and the present situation in which all the disaffected factions such as homosexuals, Jews, Blacks and whatever have turned society on its head suppressing the asylum attendants or establishing an order in their own favor.
As I read Mr. Marcus’ remarkable book there is no one loonier than Guy Debord and the Lettrist/Situationist International. Both he and Isou are busy inventing systems that have no relationship to a just or benevolent society.
Their purpose while framed in grandiose proclamations of ‘changing society for a better world’ merely mask a desire of revolution for revolution’s sake as with the 1968 Paris disturbance that seems to have been meant only to ‘epater le bourgeoisie.’ To sow discord for the sole purpose of giving meaning to Debord’s life, to make him feel that indeed he was a Mastermind and powerful individual.
How the Situationist International meshed with the Frankfurt School for the furtherance of the Jewish Revolution is predictably left unexamined by Mr. Marcus. By the early fifties the Institute For Social Research was once again headquartered in Europe. Herbert Marcuse had been left behind in the US where he took up residence at UC- San Diego translating the claptrap of Adorno and others into English.
As a continuator of the Frankfurt School then Mr. Marcus provides a link between the Dadaists of 1916, The Frankfurt School of 1923 and the postwar Lettrist/Situationist International.
Thus as Debord replaced Isou in ’57-’58 the path then led into the so-called Free Speech Movement at UC- Berkeley and spreading from there to US campuses during the decade of the sixties linking up with the Cultural Revolution of Mao that made 1968 such a significant year not only in Paris but worldwide.
Mr. Marcus gives us a stirring account of his peripheral involvement in the Free Speech Movement of Berkeley of which he seems to be very proud. While he doesn’t inform us that he himself was a chief in any committees of public safety or actually involved in any sit-ins with consequent arrest he was present at several large rallies and assemblies in which as he tells us he cheered lustily.
He seems to be convinced that the cause of ‘freedom’ was thereby greatly advanced. If so, one asks, ‘freedom’ for whom? As in Poe’s Maison De Sante for the inmates as opposed to the guards obviously. The inmates won their freedom from the asylum administrators and guards by capturing and imprisoning them. Thus as Paul Simon has been known to chant: One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. Oh, yes, indeed!
Now, Mr. Marcus’ works are sprinkled with images and metaphors drawn from the act of fellatio. While I have drawn my conclusions on the matter I leave it to the reader to draw theirs. No matter what happens then the issue at hand is of a not so subconscious sexual nature. Ultimately Mr. Marcus’ ‘total freedom’ gets down to the unlimited sexual gratification of an elite.
In pre-Revolutionary France this elite was the hereditary aristocracy. Their victims were drawn from the ‘lower orders’. For a fair example of how that aristocracy conducted itself it is only necessary to turn the pages of the works of the Marquis de Sade which Mr. Marcus undoubtedly has.
I hope I won’t offend if I say that what the Revolutionaries want is purely to displace the old elite and substitute themselves if for no other reason than to be able to gratify their sexual fantasies.
There have been several sex havens in the twentieth century where Western men could go to gratify these illicit passions. One need only mention Marrakesh, Tangiers, Thailand and locations where one can or could get all the dope one wanted, young girls and boys whose bodies could be violated at will for the appropriate price. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. One’s sexual passions can only be gratified on someone else’s body. That is what makes de Sade’s writings so terrifying.
While these sexual retreats are balms for perverted souls it is damned inconvenient to have to go so far at such great expense for such transient pleasures that require constant renewal. What to do? Why create possibilities closer to home of course.
Thus one has women lured from far away with false promises, to be installed in brothels in your home town. Or local girls plied with drugs until they will do anything you want. Better still are the hypnotic drugs, but I don’t have to go into detail on the date rape drugs.
Or, better yet, train whole generations to perverted sexual practices in the public schools from kindergarten up. Catch the little bastards at five and fill their brains with sexual filth in the name of mental health and sexual liberation.
This stuff isn’t new but what is new is its public nature and audacity. There have been small scale attempts to train men and women to gratify an elite. The Geishas of Japan are a famous example. And then there were the Irish slave women and mulattoes of the West Indies brought up to gratify the sexual needs of the planter elite with no unpleasant frictions.
One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. Full freedom for the elite is complete slavery for the majority. If Huxley’s gammas are needed they will be created, for elites need gammas.
The elite has even cleverly arranged matters so that they can train five year old little boys and girls to be buggers and whores. In control of the mainstream media they plump continuously for ‘freedom’ from ‘Puritanical strictures.’ They demand sex ‘education’ in the name of developing the full ‘human’ potential of the little buggers.
The law is perverted for the purpose. While the concept of the Law may be sacred, laws created by a minority for their convenience aren’t. As in the sixties when civil disobedience was a sacred duty it is now no less a sacred duty to disobey these laws that benefit the few to the injury of all. The principle of Law will not be violated anymore now than it was in the sixties. That was when Greil Marcus was in the bleachers of Freedom howling his lungs out.
Well, so Guy Debord somehow brought this civil disturbance in France in 1968 to fruition or so he claimed and believed. As Mr. Marcus justly points out President De Gaulle lamented the fact that the entire disturbance was caused by a few malcontents. The ‘freedom’ of Debord and the French Situationists meant the disruption if not the destruction of the lives and happiness of those who were trying to create a better civilization. But, and this is a key point, in order to do so they had to work. Debord’s key slogan was ‘ne travaille jamais’. Never work- suck off the productive.
This is where I disagree with Mr. Marcus, I don’t find the attitude admirable. One again asks the question who is the new elite that will replace the pre-Revolutionary elite? One asks for whose benefit was the babel of languages introduced in that ancient never never land or multi-culturalism into today’s Europe and America? There’s the real question Mr. Marcus isn’t critiquing. When the old world is destroyed who will rule the new order? Who will be masters and who will be the slaves? Where will the new Law and laws come from? Ah, Mr. Marcus, write a new book and tell us.
I don’t think we’ll be hearing from Mr. Marcus on that issue soon even though I am eager.
So, by 1968 the inmates were well on the way to being in charge of the asylum trying to get outside their clothes rather than in them. As I noted earlier Mr. Marcus begins his story at the end. I will now continue, taking the head of the ouroboros and place its tail in its mouth. We proceed to the first chapter of Mr. Marcus’ book, Lipstick Traces and the last part of my review.
Lipstick Traces Pt. VII: Greil Marcus
August 29, 2007
A Review
Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus
Part VII
The Assault On Charlie Chaplin
by R.E. Prindle
Apparently satisfied with the attention called to themselves by The Invasion Of Notre Dame in 1950 Isou and the Lettrist International next made an assault on the film industry and Charlie Chaplin.
Mr. Marcus doesn’t say where Isou announced his views on film or if anyone was listening but…
Qu0te:
…(Isou) both pronounced and demonstrated the manifesto of cinema decrepant, mixing up his images and his soundtrack, negating the filmic aspect of the film with torn and scratched celluloid, intentional flickering and passages of blank screen. “I believe first of all that the cinema is too rich,” he proclaimed. “It is obese. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of rupture in this fat organism we call film.”
Unquote.
What does one say to such grandiose nonsense as this? What does “the first apocalyptic sign of rupture” mean? While Isou was concentrating so heavily on letters he should have worked on the vocabulary of words a little bit. How many people listened or cared? Not many. No one, actually. Cinema decrepant? Well, it was a concept but when you peeled away all the meaning, the ‘fat’, and showed nothing but black or white film, and made the strips of blank film unconscionably long, what then? No one was willing to sit thrugh four and a half hours of blank film. Once you’d seen one frame you’d seen them all, literally.
Attention was required. How to get it? The Invasion Of Notre Dame had gotten the proto-Lettrists world wide attention. That was one successful prank. If coopting someone else’s gig worked once then it ought to work twice or perhaps three or four times running. Well, that’s questionable, the old adage is never try the same joke three times running. Isou, Debord and the other guy hadn’t heard that old adage.
The second running of the joke got results but not all that much attention.
The Lettrists stormed the citadel of the cinema at the Cannes Film Festival in a blazing display of chutzpah. The boys were resisted but through the efforts of the homosexual lobby led by Jean Cocteau the Lettrists had a modest success.
Quote:
Through the graces of Cocteau, the festival actually awarded Isou the ‘Prix de l’ Avant Garde’ which was contrived on the spot.
Unquote.
With or without the Prix de l’ Avant Garde few people were interested in viewing four and a half hours of blank film.
The joke worked twice so the boys decided to ‘epater le bourgeouisie’ one more time without variation.
Charlie Chaplin was coming to Paris to premier his film ‘Limelight’. Chaplin was already in the afterglow of his long career. Limelight wasn’t his last film but it should have been. By the time he produced A Countess Of Hong Kong his career had turned into one eternal yawn.
The boys launched a campaign printing leaflets of the most insulting and tasteless content. Except that they were of the Left they would have been jailed. An excerpt:
Quote:
Go to sleep, you fascist insect. Rake in the dough. Make it with high society (we loved it when you crawled on your stomach in front of little Elizabeth.) Have a quick death, we promise you a first class funeral.
Unquote.
All chutzpah and no civility. It’s like these guys crawled out of the sewer for the occasion. Three in a row was no charm. Who the hell cared about Charlie Chaplin? In the first place he was a Commie not a Fascist. But you can’t call a guy a Commie and insult him in France. What was he compared to Easter Mass at Notre Dame or even the pitiful Cannes Film Festival. Next to nothing. Nothing. Three strikes and you’re out. The not very interesting notion of cinema decrepant made little progress. Even the ‘films’ have disappeared.
I hope Mr. Marcus was being intentionally funny or perhaps his humor was unconscious but he says that although the film had disappeared he was working from a printed ‘script.’ It apparently takes more to write about a blank screen than to show it.
So much for cinema decrepant. So now the Lettrist-Situationist International is in mid-career from 1950-52 to 57 when Debord and Isou split. So far these guys have made no impression at all. It might be of interest to note that Lawrence Sterne in his eighteenth century novel, Tristram Shandy, had a chapter that was a blank page so Debord and Isou had an illustrious predecessor.
At any rate we’ll next attempt a review of the last chapter, titled Lipstick Traces, before returning to the first chapter. When I first saw the title Lipstick Traces I leaped to the conclusion of lipstick traces on a man’s collar betraying clandestine activities but Mr. Marcus following his song source closely gives the chapter title in full as Lipstick Traces (On A Cigarette.) Nothing clandestine there, just vulgarity. To Part VIII.
Lipstick Traces: Part VI: Greil Marcus
August 24, 2007
A Review
Lipstick Traces:
Greil Marcus
Part VI
by R.E. Prindle
Sometime in the early 1920s that supreme fantasist Sigmund Freud belatedly discovered the supreme impediment to the Jewish fantasy of world dominion- the Reality Principle. He should have discovered it in the Garden Of Paradise right at the beginning.
Freud had spent most of his life constructing a shining vision of the realization of Jewish dreams but he encountered that wall so wide you can’t go around it and so high you can’t go over it and it wouldn’t matter how many masochists beat their head against it that wall won’t fall down.
This was exactly the problem that the Free Spirits who are the centerpiece of this chapter faced. The Free Spirits of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries sect who evolved into the Libertines of the 18th century essentially were precursors of the ancient Jewish attitude that nothing was to be denied them; all things were permitted to the elect. As wild fantasists as the Jews they purportedly believed that if a woman had consecutive sex with ten different men if the last was a Free Spirit her virginity would be restored. As you can see the Reality Principle had no meaning for either sect.
Freud in the end chose to ignore the Reality Principle although how he maintained hope for the redemption of Jewish hopes is difficult to follow. It should have been clear to him that no matter how strenuously Jews pursued their dreams and fantasies they would always be doomed to failure.
As with the Garden of Paradise expulsion destruction would always be their lot. Ah, but there would always be that…remnant. What sort of dream is that?
Thus as Mr. Marcus points out even after the devastation of the death camps the Jews of Europe bounced back even before the ovens were cold with schemes to take over ‘our’ Europe. That is the remarkable story that Mr. Marcus tells us in this chapter.
I don’t know if Mr. Marcus is aware that every character in his historical novel is a psychotic. All of them are in full retreat from the Reality Principle. While I’m not sure he intends it all of them are facing terrific tensions in their daily living especially the ostensible protagonist of this story, Michel Mourre. I’m going to treat Mr. Marcus’ book as a novel and accept his interpretation of the feelings and emotions of his characters as real. Certainly he puts thoughts and notions in their minds that are beyond historians. So while the situations and characters he portrays may be factual enough his story isn’t.
The ostensible protagonist of the Invasion Of Notre Dame is a disturbed, psychotic Roman Catholic by the name of Michel Mourre. He had been reared a Communist with all the attendant utopian projections and fantasies. The test of the Communists and Mourre’s disillusionment came in 1940 when the Nazis arrived and the brave Communists including his father who had indoctrinated him crowded the train stations in an attempt to flee South.
Having lost one faith Mourre attempted a replacement in Catholicism. Catholicism failing him he was intellectually adrift wandering around the cafes of Paris spouting his discontent. He was a perfect tool. He quickly found those who knew how to use him.
These were a group of young Jews seeking to epater l’eglise. Scarcely skipping a beat on the way back from the extermination camps if they were ever in one they were continuing the Jewish war on Christianity and Europe that began long before Hitler and Stalin.
The group worked up a plan using Mourre as a tool to disrupt Easter services at Notre Dame in the year of Our Lord, 1950. How Mourre could allow himself to be duped in such an egregious manner is beyond me. Well, maybe it’s not. I was absolutely amazed- non-plussed, blown out of the water- to watch on television when Queen Elizabeth visited Jamaica to watch her being handed a sheaf of paper just before the cameras rolled and told that this was her speech. She actually read it sight unseen. If the Queen of England with a body of advisors to protect her from just such egregious errors can be duped, managed, hustled by bunch of ganja smoking hustlers then perhaps Mourre wasn’t at fault or perhaps White people are just fools. I’m still working on that one but I’m afraid of the conclusion I might have to reach.
At any rate Mourre wearing a Dominican outfit rushed up the aisles bearing a speech written for him by his Jewish confreres. Mourre must have been drugged or hypnotized. I don’t know what Queen Elizabeth’s excuse might be.
According to Mr. Marcus the speech was written by a Serge Berna one of Mourre’s Jewish handlers. The speech is written in the familiar J’ accuse manner made popular by the dupe and fool Emile Zola during the Dreyfuss Affair of the 1890s. One wonders whether Zola drafted his own letter or whether his Jewish handlers wrote it for him as in the case of Mourre. One is reminded of the ‘apology’ of Henry Ford that the American Jews wrote for him.
Although written in the first person so that Mourre mouthing the words would appear to be voicing his own thoughts he is actually expressing the views of his Jewish handlers. The language is violent, vicious and coarse expressing the deep Jewish hatred of Europe and America. It seems incredible that this message went unheeded especially coming as it did on the heels of the war. Despite both Hitler and Stalin the Jews had learned nothing.
Two quotes are outstanding of this deep abiding hatred. One should never hate nothing but hatred- Bob Dylan.
Quote:
I accuse the Catholic Church…of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West (and)…your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe.
Unquote.
That is very strong and violent language. The reference to our Europe clearly states that the conflict between Hitler, Stalin and the Jews was not one sided. It is less a question of Hitler and Stalin exterminating Jews than whether they authorized the killing of Jews before the Jews authorized the killing of Europeans. I have already mentioned the Jewish plan as expressed by their spokesperson, Noel Ignatiev, to exterminate the entire billion strong White species. The plan has been made public. If the reader refuses to take the plan and threat seriously the more fool he.
Once can cite numerous examples of Jewish murderousness as I have in my writing both on I, Dynamo and my writing on the site, ERBzine. I’m not going to repeat them now. You may consider me a prophet as Mr. Marcus considers himself.
The whole plan to bring ‘multi-culturism’ to the West is merely a variation on the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Just as the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Paradise shows the contradiction of the Jewish mind in which Semitism and anti-Semitism exist side by side so the story of the Tower of Babel that is a product of Jewish aspirations merely elucidates the principle of divide and conquer. The original notion said to be that in the building of the tower all spoke one language hence they could effectively coordinate their efforts. ‘God’, or the Jewish intellect, realized that if they spoke many languages i.e. if ‘multi-culturalism’ were introduced the peoples would not only not be unable to coordinate their efforts but there would be perpetual fighting.
Hence ‘multi-culturalism’ was introduced into Europe and America after the holocaust. That the Euroamericans would eagerly buy such a bill of goods shows what superb salesmen the Jews are.
Mr Marcus rather confusingly posits the origin of Lettrism to 1952 but then, if I read correctly, attributes the invasion of Notre Dame in 1950 to Isou and the Lettrists. I’m sure if I make Lipstick Traces my life’s work all will come clear.
At any rate Isou and disciple somehow kept Lettrism alive until 1957 when Guy Debord became involved and began the conversion of Lettrism to Situationism. Situationism somehow became involved with Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt School. As soon as things calmed down in Europe and the Jews were safe again Adorno and the School sans Herbert Marcuse returned to the scene. Thus in this mysterious way Debord and the Situationist International, Adorno and the Frankfort School and Greil Marcus are brought into the same bundle and Mr. Marcus assumes his prophetic role.
It takes a tangled mind to tell a tangled tale.
The next stop on Mr. Marcus’ itinerary is entitled The Attack On Charlie Chaplin. A review of that will follow in Part VII.
Pt. V Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus
August 21, 2007
A Review
Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces
Part V
The Crash Of Yesterday’s Art
by R.E. Prindle
At this stage of the review it will turn into a secret history of the secret history. Since last writing I have read Mr. Marcus’ opus on Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone, The Dustbin Of History and Mystery Train plus a few articles available on line. The qualities not as apparent from a volume or two become more apparent when enough material is read. No writer can write several hundred pages without revealing himself and his intentions.
Thus it becomes clear that Mr. Marcus was reared as both a Communist and a Jew. Of course he uses the palliative, socialist. He seems to have come from a privileged background while having received a Jewish conditioning. He was born in the summer of 1945. His father, Greil Gerstner, died during WWII so he must have been adopted by his stepfather, obtaining the name of Marcus.
As part of the Critical Theory of The Frankfurt School he has been trained to view life as one tragedy after another. Whereas in the Western tradition we are trained to see life as a series of adventures in which if we triumph, good; if not, then efforts must be taken to rectify the situation. There is no mystery in situationism; it is just the way it is. Thus the Westerner even more that the Jewish Guy Debord is trained as a situationist.
In his criticism Mr. Marcus unremittingly condemns the United States as fatally flawed and ripe for destruction. As this is his vision he is compelled to work toward its realization. This might be considered strange because when his grandparents or great-grandparents landed on these shores c. 1900 they thought they had found the Promised Land. So what happened in the years between then and now to turn the Promised Land into the shitheap Mr. Marcus sees? Nothing. The conditioned Jewish character merely asserted itself and Paradise turned into fecal matter. One might look to Freud for a solution but I think the answer can be found even earlier in that ridiculous Holy Book of the Jews that Westerners call the Bible.
Now, they are always looking for a paradisical ‘situation.’ According to their Holy Book 5700 and some odd years ago which is when they believe that the world was created they lived in the literal Paradise. All they had to do was keep their nose clean and mind their manners. So as to leave room for no mistakes their mentor God, or as Jews spell it G-d, told them all of Paradise was theirs to enjoy but they must never eat of the fruit of a forbidden tree. Pretty clear wasn’t it?
So then the Jews defied their mentor by eating the forbidden fruit. This act enraged their mentor so greatly he picked them up and bodily threw them from Paradise thus beginning a very long list of expulsions. Also their God did not fool around. He was unforgiving telling them to never come back at the same time setting up a guard who couldn’t be fooled to make sure they never did come back. Thus the first act of the conditioning of the Jewish people took place.
So, the scenario is that the Jews are welcomed, then the Jews repel mentor or hosts, the host eventually becomes sufficiently angry with the Jews to expel them from their midst. This scenario has been repeated for, by Jewish calculations, 5700+ years.
C. 1900 Mr. Marcus’ ancestors arrived in what they jubilantly described as the Promised Land, in another word, Paradise. They prospered mightily. Mr. Marcus himself is the product of that prosperity but, like the Jews in the Garden of Paradise, Mr. Marcus is busily trashing the Land of Promise. As he sees it the United States is fecal matter that has to be flushed down the toilet. Further he wants you to view the United States the way he does and trash the only home you have ever known or will ever know. Mr. Marcus is a dual citizen; when the country is trashed he and his successosrs will just move on as they have always done.
That’s the short form.
Now, Mr. Marcus and his fellow culturalists have declared war on the Aryan species as well as on the United States and, actually Europe. They will settle for nothing less, according to their spokesperson Mr. Noel Ignatiev, than the abolition or genocide of the entire species, one billion strong.
While this goal can be achieved by psychological means, indeed is well advanced, the fun comes from openly fuddling people. To do that one needs a power base. A power base was first achieved in Russia in 1917 but that one slipped through their hands.
But then this summer Sarkozy got himself elected President of France thus placing the power of that State in Jewish hands. One of the first things Sarkozy did was to begin to distribute French atomic weapons to France’s enemies. Unless the Jews and Moslems are secretly allied this act seems suicidal for the Jews. Who knows maybe it has reached that point in Jewish minds. It should be clear to all that as there is no God the story of Paradise is merely a reflection of the Jewish ego. In the search for anti-Semitism it is quite clear that it is a product of the Jewish outlook. In the conflict within the Jewish mind God became the first anti-Semite. The whole Jewish scenario develops from this inner psychological conflict.
A second thing that began happening after the Sarkozy election was that key Jews were beckoned to France for instructions in somewhat the same manner as Judaeo-Communist revolutionaries returned to Russia just after the October Revolution when as Mr. Marcus quotes Trotsky as saying, the Mensheviks were tossed into the dustbin of history.
Mr. Marcus was called to France in July of this year under the auspices of The Cartier Foundation For The Contemporary Arts [ http//www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1649503,00.html ]
ostensibly to give his views on Buddy Holly. Whether Mr. Marcus actually met with Jewish conspirators in private to receive instructions I can’t say but it would have to be proved to me he didn’t, especially as this ‘cultural’ forum turned into a podium for America bashing in which Mr. Marcus gleefully participated.
Speaking of Elvis Presley and Jackson Pollack the director Alain Perrin described them as “Two young people living in a society that they want to provoke to rebel against, and to mock sometimes.” I think perhaps Mr. Perrin is projecting his and France des Juifs’ opinion on Elvis, I don’t know about Pollack. I never had the notion that Presley was mocking America and I wouldn’t have liked him if he did. The early Rock n’ Rollers were not mocking anything they were just trying to break in a different musical form against great opposition and make it big. That opposition merely had to do with people who were shocked at the musical departure.
I graduated HS in ’56 and was one of a minority who accepted the music in my class. The new era began really with the class of ’57 when the form had penetrated to the youth consciousness.
The skewed Mr. Perrin goes on to say “This was the America that had liberated the world of Nazism…’ Surely Mr. Perrin meant France although in his skewed imagination it may have seemed like the world. “…but this was also a racist America, a puritan America, (no capital. It might be possible to say America was still Puritan but it was not puritan.) a hyper conservative, McCartyite America.” Well, one out of five ain’t bad especially for France as America did what the French couldn’t do themselves. I hope Mr. Perrin wasn’t offended that America wasted its own men, some of whom were my relatives, money and resources to save an ungrateful France from itself. As I understand it there was no scarcity of French collaborators in that glorious lovely Liberal Communistic ‘pure’ France of Mr. Perrin’s imagination. One would expect a Communist of Mr. Perrin’s stripe to be opposed to weird old ‘conservative’ America. But, then I’m sure he doesn’t want to talk about that in an open forum. No one expects gratitude from the French but a little realistic appraisal of the past wouldn’t hurt. Liberals are Liberals, but, geez.
Mr. Marcus slips and slides in with his two cents worth:
Quote:
In the 1950s (ten long years note) the official story was that America was back to normal (the Depression?) women were out of the factories, (happened in the forties) everything was working like clockwork, (not so, but Mr. Marcus was a nine year old and it may have seemed so) but underneath this was an entirely different story (secret history again) of confusion, conflict, desperation, (how did I survive?) desire for grandeur. Life could have been an epic story, life was dangerous ( aw, come on, Mr. Marcus, don’t put me on with all these cliches) you could step outside the role that had been preordained for you. (by whom?)
Unquote.
Now, let’s see. How many cliches are in that novelistic approach to history. Mr. Marcus says he was born in the summer of ’45. McCarthy was shot down in ’54 so Mr. Marcus would have been eight or nine. His memories of the fifties then are pretty thin so he must be reading the Time-Life Decade series for the 50s. Even then they wouldn’t have made such puerile remarks. Well, I’ve read the series and they do, so… My memory of the time was that there was no normal. The discord was right on the surface and that was no fooling around. Our town was virtually in the hands of the Chicago Outfit. Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamster bomb wielders were serious, the Korean War, the Commie Threat (that Mr. Marcus and the French refer to as ‘McCarthyite America’) produced great tensions. The Atom Bomb, my god Mr. Marcus don’t you ‘remember’ the Rosenbergs in 1953?
If you’re going to try to write history give up your sophomoric Jewish presentation. Hunker down. Get objective.
Mr. Marcus has his own secret history and mocking America is central to it.
In concentrating on the nonentities clowning it up in Zurich Mr. Marcus fails to relate Da Da to the course of the evolutionary development of Western society thus exaggerating the importance of these clowns grossly. Their effect on the development of society was minimal. The Da Da art movement did have some effect. Bear in mind that Da Da is merely a state of mind shared by a percentage of any age cadre from say 17 to 25 or so when they are struggling to find their way. Finding one’s way isn’t easy and does have its stresses. The situation of this particular group occurred as the Scientific Revolution, the real revolution, begun in 1859 with the publication of Darwin’s Origin Of Species was disrupting Western society to the maximum extent. Science challenged religious concepts including those of the Jews.
The ethos of art had run its course having achieved all that representational art could achieve. The search for novelty or an avant garde, if you will, produced Cubism, Da Da and Surrealism. Thus these clowns in Zurich who produced nothing but had a narcissitic crush on themselves were presumably able to make a noise. In reading Mr. Marcus one isn’t sure exactly what that noise was. In any event the Cabaret Voltaire changed nothing that had not already been changed or was changing.
Other than rescuing this crew from the dustbin of history and amusing us aside it is difficult to understand what significance Mr. Marcus finds in this clown act performing hackneyed stunts.
He somehow segues this act into his following act, even more insignificant than the opening act. The Crash Of Yesterday’s Art concerns the career of another complete and insane non-entity, one Isador Isou.
In order to give some significance to Isou he manages to compare him with both Elvis Presley and Tony Curtis. Not bad footwork for a fancy dancer.
As is usual with Mr. Marcus all the people he considers important are Jewish and those he denigrates are goys. Thus in the comparison between the earth shaker Presley and the non-entity Isou the latter comes out as the more signficant of the two. How Tony Curtis comes in isn’t clear unless it is his famous pompadour that is said to have influenced Presley’s hair style. At any rate the two Jews to one goi with Presley basing his hair style on one Jew while the other’s portrait often mistook him for a ‘pop star’ which it would appear raises him to a level slightly above Presley seems relevant in Mr. Marcus eyes. I don’t know, hard to dicipher.
As Mr. Marcus describes the megamaniacal Isou it would appear that he could have been at the famous dinner at the Maison de Sante described by Edgar Allan Poe in his famous The System Of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether. In fact much of Mr. Marcus writing reminds me of nothing so much as Poe’s lady who tried to get outside her clothes rather than in them. I have great difficulty taking Mr. Marcus discussion of Isou as seriously as he seems to, although I find the story a fascinating bit of trivia.
Leaving Isou’s manias aside it seems that his contribution to the deconstruction of Western Civilization was to insist that paragraphs, sentences and words were meaningless while the only thing of importance was the bare letter itself. A building block. You see what I mean by trying to get outside one’s clothes than inside. Mr. Isou grandiloquently called his ‘organization’ The Lettrist International with he and his other member. He wished to establish the Lettrist Dictatorship.
Actually as a Jew Isou was merely following the letter mysticism of the Jewish alphabet in which not only does each letter have incredible symbolic meaning but each curve and segment of a letter is also endowed with incredible symbolism. A whole several hundred page volume could easily be written concerning the letter aleph and each additional letter thus adding up to a magnificent Harvard five foot shelf of the Jewish alphabet.
Somehow Charlie Starkweather and Caril figure in here but I’ll have to go back and study to get it which would scarcely be worth it. I’ll see if I can find the time.
Mr. Marcus also recasts a version of his musings on what appear so be his favorite song: It’s Too Soon To Know of the mid-forties. Favorite songs are often inscrutable to anyone who doesn’t ‘get it.’ I know the song and while I like it, I don’t get it like Mr. Marcus does. On the other hand I don’t expect Mr. Marcus to get a couple of secret favorites of mine, one by a singer whose name I forget, Clint something or other, although I should still have the 45. I got the disc in a close out mystery package of 10 for 99 cents. The song goes something like ‘Bertha Lou, Bertha Lou, I wanna conjugate with you.’ I like it however I have never met another person who has ever heard the song.
Another favorite of mine is by the Crows (Orioles-Crows- the bird, the bird, the bird’s the word) of Gee fame that reads something like this:
I’ve got a girl named Rosie Lee,
I wanna tell ya what she did for me.
She took me in when I had nowhere to go
And that is the reason I love her so.
—-
Face like a tadpole, shape like a bear,
But when it comes to lovin’ Rosie is there.
The lyricist is certainly no Allen Ginsberg but as you can see both these songs and Ginsberg’s Howl are concerned with a certain word begining with the letter F. And the usage is indeed international. God bless Isidore Isou and the Lettrist International.
Well, enough of this funnin’, let’s get on with the serious stuff. So Isou and his Lettrist Interntional is going to segue into Guy Debord and his Situationist International but first we have to go to church. It seems to me that I have a vague memory of Part VI so the invasion of Notre Dame must have been a true international scandal.
Part VI Follows.
Pt. VI Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
August 15, 2007
Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
Part VI
Working Around The Blues
by
R.E. Prindle
Nineteen-fourteen dawned with ERB trying to work around his problems. As unbelievable as it may seem he wrote three stories in the first quarter of that year- The Beasts Of Tarzan, The Lad And The Lion and The Girl From Farris’s.
Beasts probably relates to his continuing problems with Emma. Quite probably the wishes expressed in Nu Of The Niocene remained unfulfilled as Tarzan and Jane or ERB and Emma become estranged or separated in Beasts. The separation is reminiscent of the separation in Tarzan The Untamed, Tarzan The Terrible and Tarzan And The Golden Lion. Obviously something is going on in the marriage but apart from inferences in the novel we can’t be clear as to what. Suffice it to say the couple remains together.
Then in February ERB began what must have been a painful book for him to write. He began the book on 2/12/14 almost exactly one year after his father died. George T. passed away on 2/15/13. ERB had had a year to mull over his dad’s dieing and Lad is the result.
George T. appears to have been a difficult father for his sons, all of them not just ERB. Except for ERB slipping the noose by becoming a writer none of the Burroughs Boys would have been a success in life by business standards.
The hangman’s noose is a minor theme in the stories of the teens appearing most significantly in Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid. The noose also make an appearance on the 100th anniversary of George T.’s birth in 1933’s Tarzan And The Lion Man. While the noose was intended for Burroughs alter egos in the teens in Lion Man the situation is reversed when Tarzan/ERB places a noose around the neck of God/George T. Perhaps the strange piebald appearance of God reflects ERB’s love/hate relationship with his father.
Little study of George T. Burroughs has been done. But if we postulate the burning of his distillery as the central fact of his later life from which he never recovered but edged slowly downhill then the burning of God’s castle may possibly represent the burning of the distillery.
It is possible that the fire changed the personality of George T. He may have been one man before the fire and another after. It is significant that God/George T. is associated with cannibalism. Thus the theme of cannibalism that looms large in the corpus may be associated with ERB’s relationship with his father. Thus the noose and cannibalism would be symbols of ERB’s treatment by his father.
In Lad his father surrogate is a deaf mute crazy old coot who torments the Lad and his Anima every day of their lives. I am not clear on ERB’s relationship with his mother but let us compare a passage from Howard Pyle’s story of King Arther from Volume II The Story Of The Champions Of The Round Table which it is very probable Burroughs read and was influenced by:
Quote:
So she (Percival’s mother) kept Percival always with her and in ignorance of all that concerned the world of knighthood. And though Percival waxed great of body and was beautiful and noble of countenance yet he dwelt there among those mountains knowing no more of the world that lay beyond that place in which he dwelt and the outer world, then would a little innocent child. Nor did he ever see anyone from the outside world, saving only an old man who was a deaf mute.
Unquote.
Transfer the above setting to the deck of the derelict, make the old deaf mute vicious and mean and possible substitute the lion for the mother and you have transposed Percival to the Lad And The Lion.
We don’t have enough information to be certain of the characters of George T. and Mary Evaline. ERB is reticent about his mother. Either I’m missing the key or she doesn’t appear in the stories. Not much has been said of her after her husband’s death in 1913 and her own death in April of 1920 while visiting in Tarzana. Prior to that she had been visiting her sons spending three months at a time with them. Whether she had just began this rotation is uncertain but this was the first time she had visited ERB and Emma.
George T. figures more largely in Burroughs’ writing while always in a love/hate relationship. I never had a father so I have that blind spot in my education meaning that, perhaps, I may not be the best judge of the father-son relationship. My evaluation of George T. is that he wished to maintain a dominant role over his sons. Perhaps, like many fathers, he was fearful that as his powers waned theirs would wax and they would become more powerful than he. Something along the lines of the Greek god Cronus who, having been warned that one of his offspring would replace him swallowed them whole as they were born. A stone was offered Cronus in place of his youngest son, Zeus, who did grow up to replace him.
It is interesting that George T.’s youngest son, ERB, was able to escape his meshes just as the father died.
The letters of the Burroughs Boys – George and Harry- from Yale indicate that while their father supported them he kept them on a short leash. It is true that they began college after the distillery fire so that he may have been more liberally handed before the fire so as to bind the Boys to him but we won’t know.
Having finished Yale as graduates of the Sheffield Scientific School they returned home to take up roles in the battery business that succeeded the distillery. They were only able to escape their father’s domination when Harry became ill from battery fumes requiring his living in the dry climate of the West. George begged to follow him and was so allowed.
George T. didn’t own the battery business outright in its first years. It would be nice to know something about his business associates in that business.
I have already detailed the difficulties he placed in ERB’s life that were detrimental to the formation of the lad’s character.
And then we have Herb Weston’s characterization of George T. as a stern man of the old school who he yes, sirred and no, sirred and got along with him famously.
It is not impossible that John Carter is the idealized character of ERB’s father. Carter’s own role in the Mars series does not disappear after 1913’s Warlord Of Mars but his role is greatly curtailed. A possibility.
I think it is a near certainty that the deaf mute old coot of the derelict is the negative father. In Lad he doesn’t die naturally but is killed by the Lion who rips his face off. This must be an affect of his father’s death as after the Lion kills him the Lad and the Lion continue to drift along for several months before the ship gently beaches itself, the tide goes out and the two walk ashore. Then, just as Percival saw the knights, being drawn into the outside world, the Lad sees the Arab ‘knights’ being also drawn into the outside world. He experiments with the burnoose just as Percival experimented with the armor.
Thus a year after his father’s death Burroughs attempts to escape from the ‘crazy old coots’ shadow.
That done, ERB then turns to a story begun the previous May to finish it. The long period of incubation indicates the difficulty he had in getting the story out. The Girl From Farris’s tells of the period from his bashing in 1899 to his return from Idaho in 1904.
It is a difficult story vis-a-vis Emma. ERB places his heroine in a brothel in Chicago. Harris’s, the original location, was actually a famous brothel; Harris himself being a noteworthy figure which is probably why the name was changed to Farris’s.
The woman escapes from the brothel. After a series of adventures in Chicago she leaves for Idaho where she meets the hero Ogden Secor again who had aided her back home.
Secor is in a desperate psychological state and that is probably an accurate description of ERB’s state of mind during those few years.
The woman is identified and taken back to Chicago where after a bit of legal hoopla she is exonerated, we learn that she was never a prostitute and she and Secor are married. After this number of terrible years something good happens to Secor and, one assumes Burroughs, the ray of light breaking through the clouds.
At this point in March, nearly April, of 1914 ERB and the family return to Chicago, after once again auctioning off their belongings as they had done in Salt Lake City before returning to Chicago in 1904. This has to signify in Burroughs’ mind that he had reversed his shameful performance of ten years earlier. He undoubtedly expected Emma to also accept 1913-14 as a redemption of 1903-04. Just as he had gambled and lost in ’03, in 1913-14 he had gambled and won.
Even though according to him he was living hand to mouth he ordered a new automobile (not a used Velie) for delivery upon his arrival back in Chicago. If the car was Burroughs’ Hudson then that would indicate that he had visited Baum in Hollywood as Baum drove a Hudson. ERB would want to emulate his hero. Then within a month or two the Burroughs left their old address in Chicago to move into the fancier suberb of Oak Park. Perhaps this move was made possible by the expected book royalties. Thus Burroughs continued to spend in anticipation of income rather than from money in his pocket. So Burroughs kept his hopes and dreams alive.
The springtime of ERB thus ended. The incredible psychological release of success was now to be tempered by new realities. The act of writing would now become a full time job. From 1911 to 1913 he wrote from hopes and dreams. Now he would have to settle down to turning out two or three books a year for magazine sales plus book royalties and newspaper royalties soon to be joined by movie revenues. ERB had won the gamble of quitting his day job. The Roving Gambler could now turn to the pleasures of life on the yacht.
But first there was the unfinished business of the three stories- The Mad King, The Cave Girl and The Eternal Lover- to be taken care of.
Properly belonging to 1913 the three sequels would take up a large block of time in 1914 which makes that year a transition year.
I will review the stories in the sequence in which they were written: The Cave Man July-August of 1914, The Eternal Lover, August and September and The Mad King, September-October.
Next:
Part VII
The Denouements.
Pt. 5 Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
August 10, 2007
Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
Part 5
by
R.E. Prindle
In this year of excitement for Burroughs as his success becomes established and he tries to work out his psycho-sexual conflicts it is interesting to follow the development of both.
Three of his stories expecially concerned with his sexual conflicts were followed by sequels relating to their development. The first The Cave Girl finished in March as a sort of sequel was followed by the Mad King of October-November and then in November-December of 1913 by The Eternal Lover. After a fashion these novels may be considered a trilogy.
Writing approximately a year later – 16 months for Cave Girl, a year for Mad King and eight months for The Eternal Lover- the three sequels rapidly followed each other. The Cave Man was writtin in July-August of 1914, Sweetheart Primeval (The Eternal Lover) in August-September and Barney Custer of Beatrice (The Mad King) from September to November. The diptyches were then published as single volumes. They have been disconcertedly packaged as single stories when they should be considered as different stories with different approaches to the same problem. Unless I am mistaken with the sequel to the Mad King Emma is written out of the story.
Following Cave Girl in early 1913 Burroughs wrote The Monster Men in April-May that probably has little to do with his psycho-sexual problems but relates to his long admiration of Frankenstein and probably the more recent H.G. Wells’ novel The Island Of Dr. Moreau. There will be a number of related stories along this line if not sequels.
The Warlord of Mars followed in June and July. John Carter probably relateing to Burroughs’ emasculation concerns thus having little or nothing to do with Emma. August to October’s The Mucker is a very important book, the first of what I consider a quartet exploring Burroughs psycho-sexual needs. In The Mucker a low brow hoodlum from Chicago is thrown together with a New York society girl. The novel brings together the theme of yachts, shipwrecks, cannibalism and the stranding on a South Seas island.
In this case the low brow realizes that he won’t make it in a high brow world so he renounces his claim on the society woman.
The first sequel to the Mucker gestated for three years until 1916’s Out There Somewhere (The Return Of The Mucker). In this novel Burroughs splits his personality into Bily Byrne- the Mucker- and the gentleman hobo, Bridge. Thus by 1916 it apears that Burroughs sees himself as more polished than his Mucker creation. Bridge is a voluntary exile from a wealthy Virginia family so that he unites The Prince And The Pauper in his identity while reversing the order of Little Lord Fauntleroy. It will be noticed however that Bridge combines all three of Burroughs’ most favorite books.
In the denouement Burroughs gives the society girl to the Mucker while Bridge goes off in search of the ideal ‘mate’ who is Out There Somewhere.
The second sequel, Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid (The Oakdale Affair), of 1917 continues the story of Bridge in, really, a very good story, in which at the end Bridge is revealed as not a bum, assuming his true identity as a Virginia gentleman. The Pauper become the Prince, Fauntlroy comes into his own.
The last of the quartet is 1924’s Marcia Of The Doorstep in which in a wholly fictitious way Burroughs’ Anima and Animus are united in the characters of Chase III and Marcia. This novel appears to conclude this particular exploration that has lasted for eleven years.
The Mucker was followed by October-November’s The Mad King. The Mucker was written in both Chicago and San Diego while the Mad King was written wholly in San Diego.
The Mad King returns to the theme of the Cave Girl of ERB’s relationship to Emma. He even names the lead female Emma. It seems possible that the uprooting from Chicago with all their possessions had an unsettling effect on Emma so that ERB’s difficulties with her probably become more pronounced. Certainly her discomfort is understandable but the Mad King may have determined her fate.
The title The Mad King is probably significant in this context. Once again Burroughs creates doppelgangers so that both characters are split from his own personality. Once again we have The Prince And The Pauper theme of an interchange of roles. At this stage ERB may have felt like a king but realized he was acting in a mad way.
The Mad King is followed immediately in November-December actually a matter of only twenty days by The Eternal Lover- Nu Of The Niocene. The two stories must be closely related in Burroughs’ mind. Indeed the sequel to Nu Of The Niocene, Sweetheart Primeval includes several characters from The Mad King. So one would have to ask how does Barney Custer’s sister Victoria relate to Emma.
I intend to devote a few pages to the The Eternal Lover which I consider perhaps the most imaginative and interesting of Burroughs’ stories. The inspiration for the story can be related to two of Burroughs significant influences, Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. Among others of Haggard’s work She stands out most prominently while Kpling’s very interesting ‘The Finest Story In The World’ bears directly on the theme of reincarnation and close encounters in time.
From further reading that I am doing all the time it is also becoming apparent that Burroughs is part of a very large intellectual and literary background activity. In reading a volume: H.G. Wells’ Literary Criticism I came across this entry: (p. 62, note 2.)
Quote: At the end of (Grant) Allen’s novel, Frida Monteith, now a Liberated Woman, hoping that suicide will enable her to join her lover in the twenty-fifth century, ‘walked on by herself…across the open moor and purple heath, towards black despair and the trout-ponds of Broughton.’
Unquote.
I don’t suggest that ERB read Grant Allen’s novel but as ERB himself said ‘plots are in the air.’ So that ERB is working within an intellectual milieu. His notion of time travel in 1913 is not unreminiscent of Mark Twain’s posthumous 1916 novel Operator 44. While I would not suggest that Twain received any inspiration from Burroughs certainly conceptions of time and time travel were ‘in the air.’ I merely suggest that there is a milieu from which all are drawing inspiration. Burroughs also seems to have in mind H.G. Wells’ When The Sleeper Wakes although he claimed virtually to have never heard of ‘Mr. Wells.’ In Wells’ story his hero had fallen asleep awaking several centuries in the future to find his investments had accrued making him the richest man in the world, the object of a religious cult and an impediment to its continuation.
In The Eternal Lover Nu has been asleep for a hundred thousand years. Burroughs’ title for Chap. III is ‘Nu The Sleeper Awakes.’ No chance of a coincidence. Instead of monetary rewards Nu will find that which makes life worthwhile- the perfect mate he had left behind in the Niocene. Burroughs make an unbelievably subtle comment on Wells. Wells did read Burroughs but whether he caught this is open to conjecture at this time.
In fact, Burroughs setting up Nu’s return to consciousness and his relationship to Victoria, Barney’s sister, is extremely well handled by ERB. I doubt if there is anything in genre literature that surpasses it.
Victoria and Barney have just passed the rock structure within which Nu lies sleeping. The Once And Future King motif is also suggested here as well as possibly Vivien’s enchantment of Merlin.
Speaking of her sensations she says to Barney: p. 14
Quote:
“Barney, there is something about these hills back there that fills me with the strongest sensation of terror imaginable. Today I passed an outcropping of volcanic rock that gave evidence of a frightful convulsion of nature is some bygone age. At sight of it I commenced to tremble from head to foot, a cold perspiration breaking out all over me. But that part is not so strange- you know I have always been subject to these same silly attacks of unreasoning terror at the sight of any evidence of the mighty forces that have wrought changes in the earth’s crust, or the slightest tremor of an earthquake; but today the feeling of unalterable loss which overwhelmed me was almost unbearable- it is though one whom I loved above all others had been taken from me.’
“And yet,” she continued, “through all my inexplicable sorrow there shone a ray of brilliant hope as remarkable as the deeper and depressing emotion which still stirred me.”
Unquote.
That sets the premonition of what is coming as discreetly as anything I’ve read. The psychology of Victoria’s emotions is as succinctly and accurately expressed as possible. It is very difficult to imagine the scene bettered by any writer. Haggard and Kipling who may have recognized their own work as a source of inspiration must have shook their heads in awe.
Barney is sympathetic: p. 16
Quote:
“Oh, Barney.” she cried, “You are such a dear never to have laughed at my silly dreams. I’m sure I should go quite mad did I not have you in whom to confide; but lately I have hesitated to speak of it even to you- he has been coming so often! Every night since we first hunted in the vicinity of the hills I have walked hand in hand with him beneath a great equatorial moon beside a restless sea, and more clearly than ever in the past have I seen his form and features. He is very handsome, Barney, and very tall and strong, and clean limbed- I wish that I might meet such a man in real life. I know it is ridiculous, but I can never love any of the pusillanimous weaklings who are forever falling in love with me- not after having walked hand in hand with such as he and read the love in his clear eyes. And yet, Barney, I am afraid of him. Is it not odd?”
Unquote:
So in a few pages Burroughs has created a mystery of instense interest that will be explained in the next few pages to stunning effect, certainly in 1913 if not today. Since 1913 the topic has been explared in a number of ways not least of which was the very interesting movie Somewhere In Time.
Victoria is afraid of earthquakes. As might be expected a major quake hits. The rock facing of the cave in which Nu has been sleeping for the last hundred thousand years sheers away releasing the gas and allowing fresh air to awaken the sleeper, much as in H.G. Wells excellent story.
Burroughs’ treatment of Nu’s experiencing the new world is exceedingly well done. Through a series of well wrought adventures Nu and Victoria/Nat-Ul are reunited then split asunder again as the Arabs capture Victoria carrying her to the well known fate worse than death in the hands of a Northern Sheik.
Barney and his crew find Nu taking him back to Tarzan’s house. Here Burroughs tells a story before Nu leaves to recover Natu-Ul that seems strange.
The story is told by an unnamed narrator who happens to be a guest of Lord Greystoke at the time.
As the whole scenario is taking place in the mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs we may be forgiven for assuming that the anonymous I is he.
ERB has a strange attitude toward his creation Tarzan here, almost demeaning. When Nu escapes with the wolf hound Greystoke just off handedly asserts that Nu had killed the missing dog. When this proves wrong ERB allows the others to verbally abuse their host. Rather strange, I thought.
It appears that this story that follows Mad King I can be construed as a continuation of that story as when Barney shows up at John Clayton’s ranch, the man formerly known as Tarzan, he is fresh from Lutha and there to forget. As he lost Emma in Lutha one assumes that she is what he’s trying to forget.
An American named Curtiss shows up. Victoria says:
Quote:
“Mr. Curtiss!…and Lieutenant Butzow! Where in the world did you come from?”
“The world left us,” replied the officer, smiling, “and we have followed her to the wilds of Equatorial Africa.”
Unquote.
A charming compliment to Victoria. Indeed, Curtiss is there to propose to her. Curtiss begins very charming then slowly turns vicious. Reminds one of Robert Canler or perhaps Frank Martin in real life. At one point Victoria was about to consent to marry Curtiss (Frank Martin?) but then demurred.
But then she made contact with her dream lover, Nu. the interchange of time sequences is extrememly well handled as Burroughs manages the hundred thousand year gap betwen Nu and Victoria in inventive and satisfying ways. Once again he has mingled prehistory and the present in what is definitely his most virtuoso performance. His depiction of Victoria/Nat-Ul’s blending of dream states and waking states is handled flawlessly and convincingly.
As Curtiss realizes that Nu is his competitor for Victoria/Nat-Ul he derides Nu calling him a ‘white nigger.’ I found the use of the term strange within the context.
When Nu had recovered Victoria from the Arabs Curtiss comes upon the two in the jungle unawares. He is about to shoot Nu in the back (Martin’s arranged bashing of ERB in Toronto?) when the wolf hound who has been protecting Nu and Natu-Ul leaps on him ripping out his throat and chest.
Burroughs seems to gloat over this gruesome death so that one must ask who Curtiss could represent in Burroughs’ real life.
That means, who are Nu and Nat-Ul?
Once again we have to go back to the period 1896-1900 and the subsequent years. It seems likely that Curtiss must represent Frank Martin who courted Emma during those crucial four years in ERB’s life. In ERB/Nu’s absence Curtiss/Martin courted Emma/Victoria/Nat-ul. We may assume that Emma was about to say yes to Martin/Curtiss’ proposal when Burroughs/Nu returned from the Niocene/Idaho thus foiling Curtiss/Martin’s hopes.
Now, when Nu rescued Victoria/Nat-Ul from the lion Curtiss shot him in the dark creasing his skull. This is a theme seldom or never absent from any of Burroughs’ books, therefore it follows that as Martin was responsible for Burroughs’ bashing in Toronto that Martin/Curtiss are the same.
Curtiss becomes abusive of Nu after he recovers from the effects of the near miss revealing his ‘true’ or mean side. So Martin may have, or probably did, become abusive of ERB upon their return from Toronto. It is not to be believed that he just disappeared from the couple’s life without some demonstration of anger. As we know that Martin paid close attention to Burroughs and Emma from 1900 to at least the divorce when he sent his friend Butzow/Patchin to LA to talk to Burroughs it is very likely that he interfered in their marriage through the whole Chicago period. This would explain the gruesomeness of Curtiss/Martins’ killing and ERB’s seeming to revel in it. So the whole Narrator, Barney Custer, Lord Greystoke and Curtiss story is somehow related. The missing piece of the puzzle is Burroughs’ seeming hostility to Tarzan/Greystoke. I haven’t got that yet.
Having rescued Victoria/Nat-Ul from the Arab abductor in one of the most satisfying fight sequences in the corpus Nu tries to claim Nat-ul as his own. He is still confused as to how Victoria can be of two minds as both Victoria and Nat-ul. Before we consider Burroughs’ masterful handling of the fictional situation let us consider the relation of the sequence to Burroughs’ and Emma’s real life situation. This story was written in San Diego not Chicago.
The prehisoric aspect of the story may represent the early days of their marriage before ERB lost Emma’s trust in Idaho. Thus Victoria/Emma remembers the old days but she isn’t necessarily willing as yet to replace her trust in ERB. Nu/ERB having now the two tusks of Oo the saber toothed tiger on him as proof of his devotion, possibly once again representing his John Carter and Tarzan successes, insists that Victoria/Emma return to the past with him. i.e. the early days of the marriage. In other words Burroughs wants to start all over again. The name Nu- New- may mean that ERB thinks himself a new man but the same old guy he used to be.
My hair is still curly,
My eyes are still blue,
Why don’t you love me
Like you used to do.
Hank Williams
As this half of the story ends somewhat in a quandary regarding the relationship, Victoria nevertheless agrees to return to the past with Nu.
As ERB tells the story in the novel he creates a most extraordinary scene.
Quote.
“You do not love me Nat-Ul?” He asked. “Have the strangers turned you against me? What one of them could have fetched you the head of Oo, the man hunter? See!” He tapped the two great tusks that hung from his loin cloth. “Nu slew the mightest of beasts for his Nat-ul- the head is buried in the cave of Oo- yet now I come to take you as my mate I see fear in your eyes and something else which never was there before. What is it Natu-ul- have the strangers stolen your love from Nu?
The man spoke in a tongue so ancient that in all the world there lived no man who spoke or knew a word of it, yet to Victoria Custer it was as intelligible as her own English, nor did it seem strange to her that she answered Nu in his own language.
“My heart tells me that I am yours, Nu,” she said, “but my judgement and training warn me against the step that my heart prompts. I love you; but I could not be happy to wander, half naked through the jungle for the balance of my life, and if I go with you now, even for a day, I may never return to my people. Nor would you be happy in the life that I lead- it would stifle and kill you. I think I see now something of the miracle that has overwhelmed us. To you it has been but a few days since you left your Nat-ul to hunt down the ferocious Oo; but in reality countless ages have rolled by. By some strange freak of fate you have remained unchanged during all these ages until now you step forth from your long sleep an unspoiled cave man of the stone age into the midst of the twentieth century, while I doubtless, have been born and reborn a thousand times, merging form one incarnation to another until in this we are again united. Had you, too, died and been born again during all these weary years no gap of ages would intervene between us now and we should meet again upon a common footing as do other souls, and mate and we to be born again to a new mating and new life with its inevitable death- you have refused to die and now that we meet again at least a hundred thousand years lie between us- an unbridgeable gulf across which I may not return and over which you may not come other than by the same route I have followed- through death and new life thereafter.”
Unquote.
Wow! I don’t know that that can be topped in fantasy or other fiction. And there are people who say that Burroughs has no occult background. The passage fairly drips of Haggard and Kipling. Novels and stories that he’d read perhaps twenty years or more before had been working away in his mind to surface in this magnificent speech and wonderful story.
The unbridgeable gulf clearly refers to Haggard’s Allan Quatermain. The influence of the story of She is unmistakeable while Kipling’s The Finest Story In The World is clear. yet Burroughs has built an entirely new edifice that rises magnificently above the old foundations.
Haggard and Kipling read the story too, I’m sure with their mouths hanging open. It inspired them four years later to collaborate on Haggard’s own Love Eternal. While inspired by his masters Burroughs also inspired them. It’s a pity they didn’t all three sit down to smoke a cigar and have a brandy together.
That this story has gone unrecognized seems incredible. With this half of the story ERB capped his incredible year of 1913.
The tone of the corpus changes after Nu of the Niocene.
—–
As he worked his stories were being published elsewhere. It would not be before mid 1914 that Tarzan Of The Apes would see book form but perhaps more importantly his work was recognized and serialized in the newspapers. We have to thank Bibliophile Robert R. Barrett for collating the newspaper publications that George McWhorter published in the Winter 2005 NS #61 of the BB. My information is gratis Mr. Barrett’s collation.
The New York Evening World kicked off Burroughs career when it serialized Tarzan Of The Apes beginning in January of 1913. The paper also published many subsequent novels. Following the Evening World Tarzan Of The Apes was published by the Los Angeles Record, Chicago Record, the Bowman ND Citizen.
The Return Of Tarzan was syndicated by the Scripp’s Howard papers and The Cave Girl by the NY Evening World. After 1913-14 the number of papers publishing Tarzan Of The Apes increased greatly so by the time the book was published in June of 1914 Tarzan was much more widely disseminated than the mere publication in the All Story Magazine would warrant.
Burroughs’ book publishing history is difficult to understand. the reports of untold millions of copies cannot be substantiated. Indeed it appears that in 1914 fewer than fifteen thousand copies were sold. There is no record that his publishers, McClurg’s even printed the full fifteen thousand copes of the contract. When they leased the reprint rights to A.L.Burt in 1915 there had been no record of sales success. Indeed Burt would only take the title if McClurg’s would indemnify them for the first twenty thousand copies if unsold.
The cheap edition did well well but Burt reported less than seven hundred thousand copies ehen they turned the rights over to Grossett & Dunlap. So Burroughs while having a success never realized the substantial royalties on which he had been counting and would have bought him his yacht.
The springtime of ERB was nearly over. By the time he wrote the sequels to The Mad King, Cave Girl and The Eternal Lover in 1914 he was already entering Summer.
Let us now examine the year 1914.
End Of Part V
I, Dynamo 