Part 1 Tarzan And The Lion Man: A Review
May 14, 2008
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#18 Tarzan And The Lion Man
Part one of ten parts
by
R.E. Prindle
First published on the ezine-ERBzine
Preface
As has been seen 1931 was a very eventful year for ERB. The viewing of Trader Horn was a seminal event in his life. The movie became a major influence on his next Tarzan novel- Tarzan And The Leopard Men. As has been noted, in April he signed the contract with MGM.
Reports vary but it appears that he may have sold the movie rights for the first film for twenty-two thousand dollars plus a five week employment contract at a thousand dollars a week. It is fair to assume that ERB spent his five weeks on the MGM lot in Culver City.
During that period of time he obviously attended conferences with Irving Thalberg so his descriptions of the ‘Boy Wonder’ are taken first hand. One imagines that he became acquainted with the Director Woody ‘One Take’ Van Dyke. I like to think they hit off with ERB getting some first hand accounts of Africa that showed up in Lion Man. As he had a copy of Van Dyke’s privately printed Horning Into Africa in his library it would seem obvious that Van Dyke presented him with a copy. Thus ERB had a fund of first hand information lacking in his earlier novels.
One also imagines he met the African stars Mutia and Riano when they visited Hollywood. They would have been the first Africans he had met. There is a world of difference between Africans and American Negroes. Perhaps for these reasons his Leopard Men varies somewhat from his usual hidden civilizations formula.
And also he would have met his script writing counterpart Cyril Hume. His new partner one might say. And coincidentally Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’ Sullivan.
One is astonished at the speed with which MGM signed Burroughs, developed a script, found actors for Tarzan and Jane, made a movie and released it a bare ten months later. What orgzainization.!
We know that ERB watched the result with sinking heart and bitter remorse for signing the contract. The MGM version of his creation was the antithesis of his own. Rather than a literate, cosmopolitan Tarzan at home both in the jungle and the capitols of Europe and cities of America the MGM Tarzan was a feral boy who wasn’t even a lord, let alone the lord of the jungle.
Our Man had just finished Tarzan And The City Of Gold when he viewed the movie. Now with his brain reeling in shock it would be a year before he got out his reply.
In my estimation it would be his last great Tarzan novel. The Big Bwana had been emasculated. But the greatest of the Tarzan novels was the result.
ERB also made it a Hollywood novel, perhaps as trenchant a criticism of the film capitol as his 1922 effort The Girl From Hollywood. He ridiculed the whole thing. MGM, Thalberg, the African expedition, the movie Tarzan and in a closing chapter Hollywood itself. In his pain and hurt he drove himself to heights he had never before attained.
Stunned by the duplicity of MGM his novel is a story of duplicity, of doubles and more doubles until one has doubles coming out one’s ears. The story within the story, the double of the story itself, of God in Heaven but all wrong with the world is a masterpiece of imaginative fiction that transcends even the exploits of his Martian creation, Ras Thavas.
As Leopard Men was permeated with sexual desire with a hint of madness, Lion Man is deeply involved with madness, insanity and a complete feeling of unreality. As Tarzan says: Sometimes I think I must be dreaming. Yea, verily, brothers and sisters. This story is one of dreams and nightmares but a dream of a story.
1.
In the novel Burroughs had two major objectives: 1. To ridicule and humiliate MGM and 2. To show them how to use all new material in a much more imaginative way than Cyril Hume had. Hume is probably ridiculed as both the writer Joe in the foreword and the scenarist Pluant in the Hollywood afterword.
There can be no mistake that the introductory story refers to the Trader Horn expedition while Burroughs includes a planning session with Milt Smith/Irving Thalberg in his MGM/BO office. Let us look at the introductory chapter carefully.
There can be no doubt that Burroughs was included in such sessions concerning the movie Tarzan, The Ape Man so that the chapter ‘In Conference’ is an authentic snapshot of how business was conducted.
The opening sentence is: Mr. Milton Smith, Executive Vice President In Charge Of Productions was in conference. There is no doubt that here Burroughs is referring to Irving Thalberg. Burroughs goes on to describe Thalberg’s actions which were considered peculiar by everyone in Hollywood.
Mr. Smith had a chair behind a big desk, but he seldom occupied it. He was an imaginative dynamic person. He required freedom and space in which to express himself. His large chair was too small; so he paced about his office more often than he occupied the chair, and his hands interpreted his thoughts quite as fluently as his tongue.
p9. Smith was walking around the room, acting out the scente. He was the girl bathing in the pool in one corner of the room, and then he went to the opposite corner and was the Lion Man.
That doesn’t sound unfriendly or hostile to me but as ERB has already identified MGM as BO (Body Odor) or Stinky Pictures Louis B. Mayer, MGM’s president, may have taken all ERB’s comments from then on as intended insults.
In point of fact ERB’s descriptions of Smith/Thalberg seem to be accurate. Thalberg was the subject of Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished final book The Last Tycoon. The novel was made into a movie of the same name in 1976, the last movie directed by Elia Kazan. Thalberg is portrayed exactly as Burroughs depicted him.
The conventional mind seems to be unable to grasp the idiosyncrasies of genius. The genius of Thalberg was that he was able to visualize the film in the manner Burroughs describes, alsmost as the author. Had he failed he would have been merely weird but as he was the greatest and surest producer of the studio era the seeming eccentricity becomes an attribute of his genius. As a writer of genius I think ERB saw Thalberg that way; how the latter of MGM interpreted ERB’s remarks may have been less generous.
The director, Tom Orman’s character is quite similar to that of Woody Van Dyke although as the physique of Orman is opposite that of Van Dyke it is clear that Orman is intended to be more fictional. The name Or-man can interpreted as Gold-man from the French Or which translates as gold. As Goldman ERB may have been slamming the Jews. ERB was less than careful in that respect in the novel. In the last chapter ERB definitely characterized Abe Potkin as a Jew placing his conversation in dialect. By Abe Potkin ERB may have been referring to Louis B. Mayer. The introduction of Clayton to Abe leaves this open to conjecture. p. 186:
This is Mr. Potkin, John Clayton, Abe Potkin, you know, (italics mine)
If ERB did ridicule both Thalberg and Mayer or was perceived as doing so then he was definitely asking for trouble. Fighting the Law in Hollywood as it were.
Like Van Dyke who had been called in to relieve director Robert J. Flaherty on a behind schedule film White Shadows On The South Seas in which Van Dyke was successful so Orman had been called in to complete a picture being shot in Borneo.
Just as Van Dyke was then assigned Trader Horn on location in Africa so now Orman is assigned to make the biggest African picture ever in the Ituri Rain Forest.
ERB probably met Van Dyke in the summer of ’31 on the MGM lot. It would seem that the two men hit it off as Orman is as well treated as Lion Man allows. It is to be presumed that Van Dyke presented ERB with a copy of his privately printed Horning Into Africa at that time.
The rest of the chapter is joshing around in a light hearted banter that was characteristic of this type of conference and introducing the members of the cast thus establishing the nature of their characters.
A detail of interest is the following quote. p. 8:
“And are we going to shoot:” inquired Orman, “fifty miles from Hollywood?”
‘No, sir! We’re going to send a company right to the heart of Africa to the -er-ah- what’s the name of that forest, Joe?’
“The Ituri Forest.”
“Yes, right to the Ituri Forest with sound equipment and everything. Think of it, Tom! You get the real stuff, the real natives, the jungle, the animals, the sounds. You ‘shoot’ a giraffe and at the same time you record the actual sound of his voice.”
“You won’t need much sound equipment for that, Milt.”
“Why?”
“Giraffes don’t make sounds; they’re not supposed to have any vocal organs.”
“Well, what of it? That was just an illustration. But take the other animals for instance; Lions, elephants, tigers- Joe’s written a gret tiger sequence. It’s going to yank them right out of their seats.”
“There ain’t any tigers in Africa, Milt,” explained the director.
“Who says there ain’t?”
“I do,” replied Orman grinning.
“How about it, Joe?” Smith turned toward the scenarist.
“Well, Chief, you said you wanted a tiger sequence.”
“Oh, what’s the difference? We’ll make it a crocodile sequence.”
In this instance ERB is spoofing himself. Over the years he had all kinds of complaints for faunal inaccuracies. The tiger bit probably hurt him the worst. He had written a great tiger scene for the first Tarzan novel that had to be changed from the All Story magazine version to the book version. ERB finally gets a chance to exorcise his frustration over that one. He was also criticized for having deer in Africa, Bara the deer, of which there are none. He first tried to bull his way through by saying he just wanted Bara the deer there. He gave in by Tarzan The Invincible and spoke of Bara the antelope. This also apparently proved unacceptable as in Leopard Men he speaks of Wappi the antelope, while the name Bara disappears completely. In the joke about the giraffe voice he is showing off knowledge while venting a little steam.
Thus he sets the scene for the first stage of the novel, the penetration of the film company into the Ituri Rain Forest. I found this sequence as well handled as any movie version might have been. ERB doesn’t try to follow Van Dyke’s narrative but creates his own story based on Van Dyke’s.
I have no doubt that there are references in this introduction and throughout the book to real people and real incidents that have gone over my head. I have located what I can with my present knowledge but I’m sure the novel is loaded with many others.
Go to: Part 2: Doubles And Insanity
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Lost Cause
May 4, 2008
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Lost Cause
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs was a man of his times. He was a concientious observer and interpreter with a prodigious memory. He seems to have had the remarkable faculty of being able to compartmentalize nearly everything he learned in his mind. When he writes his sources are nearly transparent when you know the sources. Of course the more you’ve read the novels the easier it is to see his influences.
Underlying, perhaps, its whole intellectual structure is his understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction. His father was a veteran of the GAR. One imagines that his father sometimes talked to him of his experiences although not necessarily so. How he integrates this understanding into his personal psychology is interesting. I have attempted to point out in my last few essays that Burroughs felt as though his early expectations in life of what was to be were destroyed at some point in his youth changing the direction of his life from success to failure. The story of his subsequent life then was the attempt to regain this lost status.
In the terms of the Civil War the triumphant North represented his personal defeat while the defeated South with their Lost Cause represented his life after the loss of his expectations.
He is fairly open about this mentioning his three favorite books The Prince And The Pauper by Mark Twain, Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Virginian by Owen Wister.
Prince begins as Burroughs began. Then in a sort of nightmare the Pauper who is a twin of the Prince shows up and the two identical lads exchange places, the Prince becomes the Pauper and the Pauper become the Prince. In the end the Prince regains his rightful position. The attempt to regain that position is the story of Burroughs’ life. Twinning also become an important part of the plotting of the Tarzan books.
In Fauntleroy the Prince lives a humble life after his father dies but then come back into his own.
The Virginian, of course, must have been part of the Slaveocracy dispossessed by the Civil War then trying to find his place in the world
While slavery enters into the issue it is not part and parcel of the Lost Cause. The South today stil talks of Southern civilization as opposed to Northern civilization. Both civilizations thought of the Negro in the same way but in adopting Negro slavery the slave owner thought of the Negro as another form of livestock intermediate between an animal and Homo Sapiens. To put it bluntly the Planter saw the Negro as an intelligent ape. Hence there was no more guilt to be associated with working the Negro than there was in working a mule. They were both livestock.
Thus while the North was commercially rude and crude the Southerner- The Virginian- was courtly and mannered. The Negro livestock created a situation for such a civilization to exist. The Civil War destroyed this situation so very pleasant for the Slaveocracy.
So what was lost by the emancipation of the slaves was not only so much livestock but a whole conception of life. This conception of life was the Lost Cause. Thus Burroughs having also been deprived of his early paradisical expectations was able to identify with the Lost Cause but not necessarily with the freed Negro.
With emancipation the whole relationship to the Negro changed. He was no longer something of value that had to be understood and used but a competitor who had to be baffled. The Southern Planter like John Carter and Tarzan was clearly the superior White man in pre-Civil War times and he retained that status during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era because of his superior talents- what today would be called White Skin Privilege.
Tarzan was an alter ego of Burroughs but John Carter was not although he may have had some relationship to ERB. It is more likely that Carter was based on Burroughs’ ideal of what his father might have been. It is noteworthy that Carter loses his preeminence in the Martian novels after 1913 and the death of Burroughs’ father.
Ronnie Faulkner in his recent article in Erbzine Volume 2177 makes the comment:
When Burrughs’ heroes brought change its purpose was conservative- “to restore a lost order, to put a rightful prince back on the throne.”
This is a perceptive observation but the purpose wasn’t conservative in the political sense. The purpose was to right a Lost Cause or in other words “to restore a lost order”, that order that existed in Burroughs’ childhood, “to put a rightful prince back on the throne’, that is, Burroughs himself. The whole corpus is saturated with the Prince and the Pauper theme.
The problem of the Negro remains.
In the God Of Mars the Holy Therns who are White undoubtedly represent the Planters of the slaveocracy. In American politics from the early days the South was dominant in politics. This was aided by the slaves being counted as three-fifths of a voter but with votes being voted by the Planters. Not the Whites but the Whites who were Planters. The Planters were but a very small portion of the Southern population with the Blacks and poor Whites or White Trash as we were unkindly spoken of by both the Planters and the Negroes while being equally controlled by the Planters. We po’ White Trash were forced to fight and die in the Planter’s war.
In the same way the Therns from their center in the South of Barsoom controlled both the North by religious means and the Black First Born. As in the popular representation of the Civil War the Blacks were the cause of the destruction of Joel Chandler Harris paradise, the wonder land of Disney’s Song Of The South.
The First Born of Barsoom or the Southern Negroes successfully took on the Holy Therns and destroyed their hold over them and the people of Northern Helium.
As in the South where Planters were compelled to accept their defeat and mingle with the Negroes they did the same on Barsoom.
Emancipation solved one problem but created a few others. The North sought by Reconstruction to place the Negro over the White. While slavery was wrong the placing of the White above the Negro was seen as right. That Burroughs so believed is prove by both John Carter and Tarzan. John Carter became the Warlord of Barsoom or Supreme Commander while Tarzan was the Lord Of The Jungle, the arbiter of African fates.
Whatever one thinks of Thomas Dixon Jr. he was the spokesman for the Lost Cause. He wasn’t the only one who wrote Reconstruction novels. Equally successful was a writer by the name of A.W. Tourgee. Tourgee wrote, among others, two very successful novels: A Fool’s Errand By One Of The Fools and Bricks Without Straw. He wrote from a carpetbagger and Northern point of view; the Negroes were poor benighted heathen while the Whites were merely benighted but the Negroes were superior in most respects to the Whites. Tourgee was a successful carpetbagger. Writing beginning in 1880, three years after Reconstruction ended he preceded Dixon by a few years. Dixon most likely was writing in reaction to Tourgee.
Tourgee’s novels enjoyed a longish vogue so that Dixon’s and Tourgee’s would have been competing for the popular favor. The war was over and different sentiments took precedence favoring the point of view of Dixon.
While the North rather hypocritically tried to force Negro equality or even supremacy on the South they maintained separateness of the species in the North. While the Negro was given the franchise in the South he was unable to vote in the North. So that while there seemed to be sympathy for the Negro species there was little or none for the Black individual.
This was more or less the reverse of Burroughs’ dilemma. He honored the manhood of the Black individual but he denied it to the African species. I don’t believe there can be any denying of this; thus Tarzan is The Lord Of The Jungle, a jungle god, the Big Bwana, the arbiter of African destinies. It is important that Tarzan was seen as a god compared to the Africans.
So in real life Burroughs chose Dixon over Tourgee. I’m sure he knew of both. While the carpetbagger pushed the superiority of the Negro in a society that no longer cared about Blacks, the war being over, Dixon advanced the interest of the White species against the African species while the Lost Cause resonated in Burroughs’ soul as it does today in any person who feels that they have been deprived of their birthright in life.
Oddly Burroughs had only the third volume of Dixon’s Reconstruction trilogy – The Traitor- in his library. Perhaps because John Carter’s tomb seems to be based on the tomb in the The Traitor. There can be little doubt that the latter was the inspiration for the former.
In The Traitor the tomb had been sealed from the ouside but there was a secret entrance to the tomb and once inside the tomb an underground passage led from the tomb to the old manse. Of course, Carter’s tomb was sealed with the latch being on the inside.
In 1907 William A. Dunning published his Reconstruction: Politcal and Economic which furthered the Lost Cause view and set the tone for scholarship until Du Bois published in 1935.
So, in a way the South had risen again as the Southern view of the struggle gained preeminence. The high water mark for the attitude was the filming of Dixon’s trilogy as The Birth Of The Nation by D.W. Griffith in 1915. Political winds then turned in favor of the Blacks again. A last salvo was fired by Claude Bowers in 1929 in his successful Reconstruction history, The Tragic Era. Bowers’ book dealt not so much with Reconstruction as with the politics of the era that Mark Twain depicted as The Gilded Age of which Reconstruction was a part.
Bowers book was answered in 1935 by W.E.B. Du Bois in his Black Reconstruction In America 1860-1880. This book successfully downed the Dunning hypothesis. The racial tide now swung in favor of the Blacks with any critics discredited and silenced as bigots. Just as Dixon and Dunning were successfully attacked during the twenties and thirties suffering total defeat at the end of the latter decade so were any dissident voices.
The pro-Negro point of view continued to gain strength as the century advanced. In 1988 Eric Foner published his Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution that has become the standard view. Today Reconstruction as the unfinished revolution is expected to be completed by the next Presidential election. Thus it is believed that the Lost Cause will disappear forever while according to Ronnie Faulkner Burroughs will become the apostle racial integration.
Exhuming Bob Part IX: Chronicles Vol I: Pensees 2
April 26, 2008
Exhuming Bob
Part IX
Chronicles Vol. I:
Pensees 2
by
R.E. Prindle
I rather admire Bob’s method of integrating his life into history. He makes himself part of the unfolding plan of historical development. As some very ancient fellow once said: The unexamined life is not worth living. Having posted the rather narrow parameters of his story- that of his signing by Lou Levy and his subsequent redemption of the contract- he fits in most of his intellectual development to the time of the redemption of the contract.
He does this in an interesting way. In Chaper 2, The Lost Land, an interesting title in itself, gives the feel of prehistory, he begins by describing how like some insect he burrowed into the nest of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel where he lived in parasitic comfort.
The path to Ray and Chloe’s door is interesting. First he met Dave Van Ronk, through Van Ronk he met Paul Clayton and through Clayton Gooch and Kiel. Bob is going to suck off Van Ronk and Clayton to a very large extent also. Bob describes his hosts as quite eccentric, one might almost say, weird. As a foreign body in the cocoon he even studies them dispassionately, clinically, one might say. As one species of another.
As with the other people he attached himself to they had a terrific record collection and what appears to be a large very eclectic library. While Bob appreciates the library one feels that he believes the selection of books as odd and weird his hosts. The library apparently formed the basis of his adult education as he thumbed the books. This is really the first step in how Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan the songwriter. Remember he has only a year or so before his career is fairly launched and he no longer has any use for people like Ray and Chloe. Both appear to have been queintessential Bohemians- or Bohos in brief.
In this environment Bob provides us with this biographical sketch. P. 28
I was born in the spring (5/24) of 1941. The Second World War was alreadey raging in Europe, and America would soon be in it. The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors. If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D. Everybody born around my time was a part of both. Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt- towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again, men who relied on their own resolve, for better or worse, every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval, indifferent to wealth or love, all presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble. Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesars, Ghengis Khans, Charlemagnes and Naopleons, they carved up the world like a really dainty dinner. Whether they parted their hair in the middle or wore a Viking helmet, they would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with- rude barbarians stampeding cross the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.
I don’t necessarily agree with the interpretation but one might ask what its intellectual background is. As bob was writing at the age of 53 of a period he didn’t remember and probably hadn’t formulated his opinions by 1959 he is projecting subsequently obtained knowledge back on his birth as falsified Persistence of Memory. I admire that. One has to have order in one’s life.
Actually if one has read more than somewhat in certain areas the intellectual foundations are more than apparent. Bob was born Jewish and for four years after his Bar Mitzvah- turning 13- he attended a Zionist summer camp for a month or month and a half in those summers.
There was a synagogue in Hibbing but it isn’t clear that Bob regularly attended services or was very observant. As an illustration of what being Jewish means let me cite an ad for the new cable channel called Shalom. This is the first all Jewish channel. In the ad or blurb a man is discussing his Jewish education. He says that they tell you that you will attend a goi school where you will learn to be an educated man. And then you will also attend this other school where you will learn what it means to be a Jew. The man says that he already knows what it means to be a Jew- You suffer. You suffer.
Thus at Camp Herzl- the Zionist Camp- Bob spent four summers learning to suffer as a Jew. Bob didn’t mention Camp Herzl in his book.
Now, Jewish teaching is that only Jews can rule a just world. Only Jews are cultured and learned, all others are like ignorant bulls in a china shop- mere barbarians. The last phrase In the quote from Bob is that the goi leaders were- rude barbarians stampeding across the earth and hammering out thier own ideas of geography. This is the exact opposite of how Jews imagine that they would be managing things.
the notion is that only Jews are capable of creating a just sane society. This notion hasn’t proven out well in post-WWI Russia, Hungary, and Central Europe or today’s Palestine but facts don’t disturb the notions of ideologues. We know that Bob is an Israeli citizen and it appears he follows the Party line. Can’t help himself, really, that was the way he was educated on the Jewish side.
Then, on pages 27 and 28 bob finds it important to mention Adolf Eichmann. Now, Bob only has 300 pages to work with here so we may assume he has selected only very key items to discuss. One could easily write 300 pages without mentioning Eichmann. I’ve written close to 3000 pages of autobiographical fiction and I don’t believe Eichmann has come up once. Nevertheless Bob writing of the time at the age of 53 has this to say:
(Ray worked) also an Omaha slaughterhouse on the kill floor. Once I asked him what it was like. “You ever heard of Auschwitz?” Sure I had, who hadn’t? It was one of the Nazi death camps in Europe and Adolf Eichmann, the chief Nazi Gestapo organizer who’d managed this, had been put on trial recently, in Jerusalem….His trial was a big deal. On the witness stand Eichmann declared he was merely following orders, but his prosecutors had no problem proving that he had carried out his mission with monstrous zeal and relish. Eichmann had been convicted and his fate was now being decided on….The State of Israel claimed the right to act as heir and executor of all who perished in the final solution. the trial reminds the whole world of what led to the formation of the Israeli State.
Spoken like a true Israeli patriot. There is no need to defend Eichamnn, the disposal of the conquered belongs to the conqueror without the legal hocus pocus of a trial. Did anyone believe that the Nuremburg Trial wouldn’t find the defendants guilty? Why the charade? There was no exonerting evidence that was going to be considered. The Israeli State was not even in existence during the Second Wrold War so by what right does the State of Israel act. None. Their own will. Be honest, they wanted to kill this guy, that’s all. They weren’t even one of the conquerors. They had nothing to do with the defeat of the Axis.
So what does the trial of Eichmann mean? The Israelis violated all international law by abducting an Argentine citizen without authority or extradition. If Eichmann was a thug the Israelis were no less so. Did they feel they had an overriding grievance? Bully for them. If they’re interested I’ll send a list of mine which I feel no less passionately.
And then the State of Israel has appointed itself to act as heir and executor of all who perished. That’s a convenient right to assign oneself. I, The Jury as Mickey Spillane said. What a convenient right. It doesn’t square with justice but then who among them are objecting. The Jews were self-righteously against capital punishment in all the other barbaric countries of the world. But…they would make an exception in Eichmann’s case. As time would show they would make a lot of exceptions. Assassination became there mode of operations.
As I say there is no need to defend Eichmann, if you want to kill him, kill him. No one will object, but to set aside all the rules, all the laws that separate civilization from barbarism seems a bit extreme. It does make one question one’s sincerity.
The trial does fit within the time frame of the novel though, so Bravo! Bob.
After that little moriaistic lesson for us all Bob brings us up to date on some of his musical influences, which were all excellent and then acquaints us with the foundation of his literary and intellectual education as provided by Ray and Chloe.
He says he did little reading as a kid. He also says he was not much of a student. One gathers then that the talk of the biographers about Bob being on the honor roll was a figment of Mother Beatttie’s imagination. She was apparently telling them of the Bob she wished Bob had been instead of the Bob that was. Primarily his own reading considted of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Luke Short and H.G. Wells.
Good influences all. Luke Short was also my favorite Western writer, him and Ernest Haycox. Of course I remember not a shred. The choice of H.G. Wells is probably represented by Seven Science Fiction Novels of H.G. Wells. His reading or Wells probably consisted of The War Of The Worlds, The Island Of Dr. Moreau and The Invisible Man. The other four didn’t get read very often but I have come to really appreciate The Food Of The Gods and In The Days Of The Comet. I’m a big Wells fancier myself having read about 90% of a very large corpus, some of it two or three times. At Bob’s age however I was only familiar with the volume Seven Science Fiction Novels Of H.G. Wells.
Edgar Rice Burroughs is my forte as my essays on I, Dynamo and ERBzine will attest. So both Bob’s and my own influences closely mesh. It is of interest to note that having read Tarzan Bob married a Black woman and installed her in Tarzana. Burroughs of course founded Tarzana naming it after Tarzan. Cute.
Bob goes on to discuss items he read in Ray’s library. Ray was a pretty interesting reader. Bob really fell through the rabbit hole when he moved in with Ray and Chloe.
I don’t feel the need to run through what he read, the reader can check it out himself if he wishes, but Ray provided Bob with a nagnificent foundation in a very short time. I am impressed that Bob found Honore de Balzac a great writer. Damn, that Bob does have an unerring nose for the best in both records and literature. Balzac is one of my favorites too although I’ve only read about twenty volumes of the immense corpus Balzac called the Human Comedy. If you want to read a really stunning story, a novelette, get The Girl With The Golden Eyes and have your life changed. Too bad Bob got confused by being forced to try to combine a liberal education with a Jewish one. I’ve got a Jewish one too, acquired late however, but I scrapped it as useless.
Book II, Pt. 4 Something Of Value
February 13, 2008
Something Of Value
Book II
Part 4
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
ERB And The World 1875-1950
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs entered a world he never made on September 1, 1875. He would have some hand in editing the making of the next century or so. He seemed a less than likely candidate for such a chore. He was dealt a tough hand to play by life. It took him some thirty-five years to learn how to play his hand but once he learned there was no stopping him. He wasn’t perfect, probably had what we call an abrasive personality, and he didn’t always do the right thing but, then, who does? He worked hard and he walked his dog with an ample leash. But in this essay we’re not particularly concerned with ERB the personality but ERB the force.
ERB’s world was made for him. It was his job to navigate his way through it. I have already prepared a view of the world and its history in terms of religion and evolution extrapolated from the writing of Burroughs. It may be of use to give a bit of the local history that had such a profound effect on his development.
ERB was born in Chicago. The Chicago that he was born into was one of the seven wonders of the modern world. There had been nothing like it seen before, not New York City, not Paris, not London, not even ancient Athens or Rome. The Iron Chancellor of Germany, Bismark, lamented the fact that he would never get to see ‘that Chicago.’ It is hard to imagine the role Chicago played today. Chicago was unique, both wonderful and terrible. It may be difficult to visualize but for the Chicago of Burroughs’ youth, to the East was civilization and directly to West was Indian Territory. The Indian Fighters came direct from the battlefield to the metropolis of Chicago. I mean, Buffalo Bill had Sitting Bull as one of his performers. Blows my mind.
As if to prove its uniqueness Chicago staged the 1893 Columbian Exposition or World’s Fair, the fabled White City. The White City may be compared to OZ while workaday Chicago was known as the Black City. You gotta work at visualizing this stuff. The White City was as audacious as Chicago itself. It only took fifty years to raise this strange, bizarre and wonderful city out of the muck alongside Lake Michigan and it only took a year to build what was really a spectacular purpose built city of some magnitude. Even more mindboggling it s purpose existed for only six months then it was discarded like so much waste paper. Incendiaries burned this amazing effort to the ground the next year. Nothing was left of this prodigious effort. It is truly a crazy world.
Bill Hillman of ERBzine made a valiant effort to present the wonder of this spectacle especially as it affected the young Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was a valiant attempt and a worthy one opening my eyes to this wonder in ways they had never been opened before, however as good as Hillman’s effort was it couldn’t come close to the grandeur of the spectacle.
To have visited this incredible fair for few days, a week, or even two was to have seen nothing. Edgar Rice Burroughs, then 17, had the great good fotune to have spent the whole summer at the fair. It was the experience of his life. The world was on display. Authentic Dahomean villages with real tribesmen brought from the jungles for the purpose, authentic Irish villages- of course, there were enough authentic Irish around Chicago to staff those so they didn’t have to be brought over- Arab camps, evolution, religions of the world, scientific wonders, everything imaginable and in real authentic detail with real everything and it was cutting edge. This was not any Disneyland fake. It was like traveling around the world. A diorama of realities. It blasted through ERB’s existence like a tornado across the Kansas plains. That was how the author of the Oz series, L. Frank Baum, who was in attendance saw it. It was a regular tornado that transported him to another world- we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
As Editor Hillman pointed out in his series of articles, the White City was a phenomenon of firsts. Bill didn’t get them all though. One he missed was that Frederick Jackson Turner, always be suspicious of three name writers, first presented his thesis ‘The Influence Of The Frontier In American History’ at the fair. The disappearance of the frontier was as important an event in world history as any. With the arrival of HSII and III on the Pacific shores all sub-species were in direct contact with each other around the world. The stage for ev0lutionary Armageddon was constructed.
In its own way 1893 was as important as 9/11/01. A world change began to take place. The previous four hundred years of HSII & III domination began to wane. As usual the avant guard of writers and artists had a glimmer of understanding; the rest kept walking right along as though they hadn’t passed through the glimmer into this new parallel world.
The writers perceived things differently. Among the writers were H.G. Wells, Sax Rohmer, Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe and of course Edgar Rice Burroughs. As it is with artists they began writing in terms of the new reality, perhaps without being conscious that they had abandoned the old. By the mid-teens and early twenties non-fiction accounts had begun to appear. Most famous were those of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard’s The Rising Tide Of Color pinpointed the issue but after some initial success he was denounced as a bigot and throughly discredited. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what he was talking about but his message was offensive to certain pressure groups.
In its own way so were the writings of the great mythographers. With the exception of Wells they were all political conservatives. Well’s success came as a mythographer before he declared himself a Red/Liberal in 1920. From that point, which occurred just as the Great War ended, his novels fell flat although his Outline Of History was a great success.
Every effort has been made to discredit the mythographers, but their creations have maintained a stunning popularity despite Red/Liberal efforts to destroy them. Lately the Reds have turned to detournement. In Well’s case, as a member of the prevailing orthodoxy he has, of course, been idolized and eulogized, but they can’t get anybody to buy anything but his science fiction.
Perhaps because he tackled the different themes of religion and evolution in an independent manner great effort has been made to discredit Burroughs. Frontal attacks have failed to this point although perhaps ridicule and detournement will be more effective. The Disney Corporation may be successful in trivializing the Big Bwana unless we counter with a more effective campaign.
Many thinkers were presenting scientific bases for the analysis of social and historical trends. Two of the most prescient were Darwin and Freud of whom I have gone to some effort in integrate into my analysis. These men presented scientific methods, where were real methods, objective bases not based on the inner world of wishful thinking. I can understand how Red/Liberals wish to cast their web of wishful thinking over the mind of mankind but I don’t understand the unwillingness of people to see through this fantastic projection. The reality principle has to take effect sometime.
Yet these mythographic prophets of reality have been scorned or willfully miscontrued. If one looks at Burroughs’ work carefully he is functioning as a prophet based on scientific principles that were plausible in his day. Nothing he or any of the mythographers said has been disproved by further scientific advances.
Before going into this further let us take a close look at Burroughs’ magnum opus Tarzan Of The Apes. What he had read in evolution to this time except for Darwin isn’t certain. In 1933’s Tarzan And The Lion Man he implies he has read Lamarck, Darwin, Mendel and August Weismann. Lamarck was of the eighteenth century who believed in inherited characteristics. Darwin published his Origin Of Species in 1859, Mendel wrote his genetic study in 1866 which was rejected by Darwin who eclipsed Mendel until, as the result of Weismann’s studies, he was rediscovered in 1900. Weismann wrote during the eighties and nineties advancing the theory of germ and soma cells. It is possible that Burroughs could have been familiar with all four by the time he wrote Tarzan Of The Apes. Lamarck and Darwin are readily evident. Burroughs favored the notion of Lamarckian inherited characteristics, which is justly out of favor today. Thus as an allegory of the ascent of man Tarzan relies heavily on Tarzan’s heritage to explain his sense of his separation from the apes among which he grew up as a feral child.
In Burroughs’ story Tarzan comes from the finest hereditary stock of noble Englishmen. Thus according to Burroughs he inherits a number of moral and mental faculties rather than acquiring them. There is no mistake that Burroughs considered the English to be the crown of creation. As a one year infant Tarzan’s parents die while he is adopted by Kala the ape. Burroughs’ apes are not known to any science perhaps representing the ‘missing link’ which used to be a hot topic.
The idea of an unknown species of ape falling somewhere between known apes and human beings is not as unreasonable as it may sound. It was only in 1902 that the existence of the Mountain Ape was confirmed. The Mountain Apes of the Mountains of the Moon had been rumored for some time before the first specimen was killed and the skin brought back. These are amazing anthropoids. So, within the context of the times the notion of such apes was not all that far fetched.
Many wonders were thought to be hidden in Africa. Even as late as 1920 The New York Herald ran an article seriously considering the notion that dinosaurs still existed in the Congo. While at this day we may read Burroughs with a very large grain of salt much of what he writes about was discussable as possible fact at the time.
As Burroughs’ apes are evolutionarily above the monkeys and gorillas they may be seen as the last stage of evolution before the First Born appeared. Burroughs makes a big point that Tarzan passes through the full evolutionary program on his way to realizing his noble English heritage as a fully evolved human being.
This theme is also reviewed in his The Land That Time Forgot.
One of the most difficult feats of Tarzan to accept is the manner in which he taught himself to read and write English without knowing a single phonetic value. However his ability to do so can be explained in a reasonable manner.
While reading through John Chadwick’s work The Decipherment of Linear B, Linear B is, of course, the written language of the ancient Myceneans and Minoans, which was a terrific problem until Michael Ventris succeeded in breaking the code, I came across this passage:
Cryptology has now contributed a new weapon to the sudent of unknown scripts. It is now generally known that any code can in theory be broken, provided sufficient examples of coded texts are available. The only method by which to achieve complete security is to ensure continuous change in the coding system or to make the code so complicated that the amount of material necessary to break it can never be obtained. The detailed procedures are irrelevant, but the basic principle is the analysis and indexing of coded texts, so that the underlying patterns and regularities can be discovered. If a number of instances can be collected , it may appear that a certain group of signs in the coded text has a particular function, it may, for example, serve as a conjunction. A knowledge of the circumstances in which a message was sent may lead to other identifications, and from these tenuous gains further progress becomes possible, until the meaning of most of the coded words is known. The application to unknown languages is obvious; such methods enable the decipherer to determine the meaning of sign-groups without knowing how to pronounce the signs. Indeed it is possible to imagine (my italics) a case where texts in an unknown language might be understood without finding the phonetic value of a single sign.
The task before Tarzan was formidable but he had all the time in the world without any distractions. I do not mean to say that it would be possible for a feral boy to develop this amazing intellectual ability since the feral children found are quite incapable of learning. But, in Burroughs’ mind Lamarckian notions of inherited characteristics was foremost so that he believed as did most of his contemporaries and a signficant percentage of the population today that these characteristics were operative.
As one reads one comes across some remarkable things. Having just read Alexandre Dumas’ Memoirs Of A Physician I came across a tale somewhat reminiscent of Tarzan’s story. In fact the similarities of some of the details between Dumas’ book and Burroughs’ are quite amazing although I do not suggest that Burroughs ever read this Dumas novel.
In this scene a young man named Gilbert has met the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau in the woods where Rousseau is collecting botanic specimens. Gilbert does not know who he is talking to.
‘You can read and write.’ (Rousseau asked.)
‘My mother had time before she died to teach me to read. My poor mother, seeing that I was not strong, always said, ‘He will never make a good workman; he must be a priest or a learned man.’ When I showed any distaste for my lessons, she would say, ‘Learn to read, gilbert, and you will not have to cut wood, drive a team, or break stones.’ So I commenced to learn but unfortunately I could scarcely read when she died.’
‘And who taught you to write?’
‘I taught myself.’
‘You taught yourself?’
‘Yes, with a stick which I pointed, and with some sand which I made fine by putting it through a sieve. For two years I wrote the letters which are used in printing, copying them from a book. I did not know that there were any others than these, and I could soon imitate them very well. But one day, about three years ago, when Mademoiselle Andree had gone to a convent, the steward handed me a letter from her for her father, and then I saw that there existed other characters. M. De Taverny having broken the seal, threw the cover away; I picked it up very carefully, and when the postman came again, I made him read me what was on it. It was, ‘To the Baron de Taverney-Maison-Rouge, at his chateau near Pierrefitte.’ Under each of these letters I put its corresponding printed letter, and found that I had nearly all the alphabet. Then I imitated the writing; and in a week had copied the address ten thousand times perhaps, and had taught myself to write.
This is surely no less fantastic than Burroughs’ story but because Dumas is considered more credible nothing that I know of has ever been said about it.
In Tarzan’s case Burroughs makes a point of saying that he had a number of children’s picture books so that he could, for instance match the printed spelling of B-O-Y with a picture of a boy. In this way also he learned that he was not a freaky hairless ape but an entirely different species. I cannot, of course, defend the plausibility of either Burroughs’ or Dumas’ story but there is a possibility.
In some ways the notion of inherited characteristics seems as though it could be true. In the course of evolution the thrust has always been towards more intelligence. A species once evolved has its range of capabilities and once those are fully developed no further advance is possible in that sub-species. It is up to the next stage of evolved sub-species or species even to advance to the limits of its capabilities and so on. Thus it was not possible for Tarzan’s fellow ape, Terkoz, under any circumstances to succeed in Tarzan’s quest. The necessary intelligence genes were missing. Even though Tarzan was raised by apes less evolved than himself he himself did have the necessary inherited genetic makeup to undertake the task with some chance of success. So, in that sense Lamarck’s inherited characteristics did apply.
It may be argued that Tarzan couldn’t have recognized the signs as language. In theory he could have. Whether in fact he would have or whether it would have taken him much longer to break the code than eight years are of course valid realistic objections. But Burroughs was writing the story so that against all objections there are methods by which it was theoretically possible for Tarzan to do so.
This is no small point for the story as the story is, as I see it, an allegory of the ascent of man toward godhood. Burroughs will repeatedly call Tarzan a jungle god.
He is introduced to the next evolutionary stage when his ape mother is killed by one of the First born. Drawn into contact with the FB Tarzan passes through this stage in evolution. I don’t think there can be any doubt that Burroughs considered the First Born an antecedent level of evoltuion to HSII and III. While some might inanely cry bigotry, mocern science, which was unavailable to Burroughs, has at least proven the plausibility of the position.
Tarzan then comes into contact with a cross section of HSIIs and IIIs. To my mind the differences are presented as innate and not a matter of environment or nurture. Just as Tarzan must realize his noble English heritage because it is his innate nature so these ruffians are ruffians because of their innate nature. Burroughs seems to be saying that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
While withing a particular sub-species I am an environmentalist believing that people beocme what they are for reasons beyond their contro, the majority of mankind, at least those place in favorable circumstances, believe that they are innately better than the rest. So if Burrughs was srong on this point, as I believe he was, he was in step with the prevailing prejudice.
Thus under the tutelage of Paul D’Arnot, his French mentor, Tarzan realizes his full potential as a human being uniting the two ‘highest’ branches of what was then known as the White race. Tarzan can read and write English but not speak it while he can speak French but neither read nor write it. There’s something going in Burroughs’ mind but I haven’t decided what. But he tosses off these details in such an offhand manner that all seems so natural there is no reason to note it.
It must also be remembered that Burroughs wrote at the transition point where for the first time in US history there were more people living in cities than in the country. The new city dwellers had just reason to long for the rural ‘paradise’ they had just left. Thus Tarzan having seen all there is to see of civilization snubs his nose at it to return to his beloved jungles and its animals and primitive but honest First Born.
In a sense then the jungle and the First Born can be interpreted as the farm and the crude but honest farmer. An idealization to be sure.
As far as I can see Burroughs was the first novelist, or at least successful one, to treat of evolution by which I don’t mean to say Lost World adventures. Further he treats with it as established incontrovertible fact at a time when evolution was accpted by few while being rejected by the vast majority. And I repeat, Burroughs was learned and thoughtful about the subject. That he was also fanciful is beside the point.
At the same time Burroughs was offering some serious reflection on evolution he was also presenting some serious thinking on the evolution of religion which is certainly on a par with Freud’s Totem and Taboo.
Burroughs says and this is seemingly in his hown historical voice that the Dum Dum as practiced by the apes was the source of all social and civil rituals. As I read Tarzan Of The Apes it seems that Burroughs thinks that Dum-Dums or something just like them really took place. Of course such round or circle dances are in fact of great antiquity. Perhaps something just like a Dum Dum did perform a role in the evolution of institutions.
Following that explanation for the foundation of religious and civil institutions Burroughs goes into a very careful explanation of how Tarzan became the god, Manungo-Keewati of Chief Mbonga’s tribe. This explanation is very carefully developed. Burroughs is also very serious and I think believes he has a handle on the truth about the evolution of god.
As part one of a trilogy on religion Tarzan Of The Apes is followed by The Gods Of Mars and then the Return Of Tarzan. Gods Of Mars is a condemnation of formal religion with far reaching ramifications. In Gods Burroughs plays the role of a savior through his character, J.C.- John Carter. Carter destroys the ancient and flase religion which clearly resembles the Catholic Church, thus being the liberator of Barsoomkind.
In The Return Of Tarzan he gives a fanciful but reasonable vision of ancient sun worship which would fall somewhere between Munumgo-Keewati and the Holy Therns of Barsoom.
Thus under the guise of ‘pure’ entertainment the attentive reader can detect a serious attempt to explain evoltuion both special and religious while undermining established beliefs in the manner of a prophet. It is not necessary to accept it only recognize it.
I’m sure Burroughs in the light of all the unsetlling discoveries beleives he is a light bringer doing a service for mankind. I accept him at his own valuation.
Running through all Burroughs work is an unstated vision of psychology. One may well ask where this vision came from as Burroughs was not fortunate enough to attend Yale which is two eldest prothers did and which he keenly regretted not having done. I’m sure the man was reasonably well read in the subject while his views appear to follow rather closely those of his brothers’ partner in the Idaho ranch, Lew Sweetser.
A very fine article on Sweetser by Philip R. Burger appears in issue #19 of the Burroughs Bulletin, since republished on ERBzine. Now, Sweetser graduated from Yale in 1889 a little before Freud began his psychological publication and twenty years or more before his books were translated into English. I doubt that Sweetser ever read Freud, but I can’t say.
He was fully conversant with a concept of the unconscious and exceptionally well informed on the rule of suggestion and hypnosis. Whether over the intervening eyars from 1889 to 1920 when he took to the stage as a lecturer he read extensively or whether re reworded his ideas acquired by 1889 I can’t say. But he had a good grip on the concepts of the subconscious and suggestion including auto-suggestion.
Burroughs came into contact with him as a 16 year old when he worked on the Idaho ranch in 1891. Again in 1898-99 and once again in 1903. Burroughs own views on psychology follows those of Sweetser very closely with add ons from further study.
If not as systematic Burrughs presents a consistent approach which is as viable as Freud’s but different in the treatment of the subconscious. Both Sweetser and Burroughs always speak of the subconscious, never the unconscious, while Freud chose to believe in a metaphysical unconscious.
What I hope I have shown here is that Burroughs had a fairly mature understanding of life and society when he began to write and which he continued to develop throughout his life.
While hos own life was lived somewhat erratically his intellectual mooring was much more sound. It is the latter which is telling for us.
The importance of his intellect being developed by the time he began writing is that the period of the teens of the twentieth century is when subsequent history took shape. Just as Burroughs collected the strands of neo-mythographers to give them their new direction so the teens did also for the evolution of the species and religion in both the United States and the world.
While Burroughs and the other mythogrpahers realized very early that the tide of history had changed it was only by 1916 to 1922 that the concept found expression in an academic manner.
In 1916 Madison Grant published his The Passing Of The Great Race and in 1922 Lothrop Stoddard published his The Rising Tide Of Color Agains White World Supremacy. and here comes the division in society that can never be reconnected. Both Grant and Stoddard are quite serious historians; both are men of good will, both have been seriously defamed by others who object to the resulsts of their investigations.
These objectors seem to think that their opinion is of divine origin and that any other opinion is not only wrong but evil. They take a stand not much different fromt he Inquisition and its witch hunting which I have already discussed. Thus these people want to run dissenters to ground and if not actually kill them at least hurt them so bad or brand them as pariahs that they will shut up.
A recent example is Richard Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation. The book is an attempt to squash writers such as Grant, Stoddard and Burroughs. The first 225 pages of his mammoth book are dedicated to demonstrating that Edgar Rice Burroughs was a vile ‘racist’ who was influenced by the even more vile ‘racists’ Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.
While you can throw away the last five hundred pages of Gunslinger Nation which is inadequately researched and poorly presented, the first 225 pages are fairly interesting if skewed. A lot of good information of possible influences on Burroughs. Slotkin’s fine biographical sketch of Buffalo Bill is very informative.
Slotkin lists a number of Burroughs’ books which he has apparently didainfully skimmed but without any understanding. If he had read more carefully he ought to have realized that Burroughs’ ideas were fully developed before Grant and Stoddard were issued. While many of the ideas of the latter writers may have been complementary to Burroughs’ ideas they couldn’t have been formative.
Further with the customary tunnel vision of the Red/Liberal Slotkin ignores what was happening against which these men were reacting. Of course he and his contemporaries give this data such a skew as to lack all credibility.
Like all Liberals Slotkin believes that immigration is a prescriptive right for anyone who wants ‘to share what we’ve made here.’ While not wanting to get involved in immigration quarrels, which are fruitless, I do believe that as I have a right to say who can and cannot enter my home, any country has a aright to say who can and cannot immigrate to their country. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a good reason or not nor does it matter if rejection is based on the grossest prejudice. No one has a right to invite himself to your table. You see why there is no chance of agreement. So much for immigration.
Now in Darwinian terms the various sub-species were not only in contact with each other, they were peacefully intermingling in the West and in the West only. It is important to remember that HSII and III were about to be driven out of Africa and Asia. The invasive flow was now beginning in the opposite direction only. While the HSIIs and IIIs had been able to displace the American aborigenes without trouble this was no longer possible anywhere in the world. The tide against the HSIIs & IIIs had turned. While the IIs & IIIs would slowly be expelled from Asia and Africa, Africans and Asians while already in Europe and America would begin to increase their numbers dramatically.
Today a city of Toronto is 50% what Torontians call ‘visible minorities.’
Thus while IIs & IIIs began a retreat the other sub-species began an advance into II and III territories while becoming highly organized. The Eastern European Semites began to arrive in the United States in numbers beginning in the 1870s. Always politically aggressive, the German Semites formed the B’nai B’rith in 1843. the American Jewish Committee in 1906 and the horribly bigoted Anti-Defamation League in 1913, the year Woodrow Wilson entered the White House.
The Great War beginning in 1914 closed off European immigration to the United States but increased the internal migration of the First Born. It’s an ill wind that blows no one good. The First Born began to organize on an international basis. African, Brazilian, Caribbean and American First Born began to act as a unit. This organization was led by West Indians who emigrated to the United States to agitate. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican, personated this most important stage of evolution which has led to the present situation. At roughly the same time, under the guidance of Semitic Jews, the NAACP- Natinal Association For The Advancement Of Colored People- was formed.
In reaction to these very aggressive developments the post-Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan was called into existence. On top of all these unpleasant developments the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded in Russia in 1917. Thus a whole new paradigm was formed within just a few years in the teens. Against this Burroughs’ mindset had been formed by the years from 1890-1910. the new developments sure appeared to him as a bad motorcycle with the devil in the seat.
The world which emerged from the Great War was much different from that which preceded it. the balance of world emigration changed, as it were, overnight. A good harbinger of things to come was The Rising Tide Of Color Against The White World Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard’s title was very ill chosen although it represented the emerging reality. He might better have chosen a more neutral title such as ‘Changing Patterns in World Migration’ or some such. The book is unfairly characterized as ‘racist’ by its detractors, which it is not.
Stoddard pointed out the obvious: that from having been the dominant sub-species the tide had now turned and rather than being a dominant military presence the HSIIs and IIIs had become a minority in a world of sub-species seeking like Darwin’s ratos or cockroaches to drive the others before it. From having been invaders, Europe and America would now be invaded.
This is the way of the world: ;either you’re on the top or you’re on the bottom. A world of equality is a world away.
Stoddard was the proverbial voice calling in the wilderness. The only people taking him seriously were the peoples he was warning about. Confident in teir seeming superiority the HSIIs and IIIs went about their business as if nothing had changed.
Not exactly as if nothing had changed because the Bolsheviks continued special and religious battles. Just as Catholicism was infused with Semitic ideals, through Karl Marx, Bolshevism was a Semito-Red/Liberal religion.
Of the five sub-species by far the smallest was the Semitic branch; they were and are therefore the most threatened. In order to hope to exercise world dominion, and don’t think world dominion isn’t the question, the Judaic and Moslem religions were created. The Jews had the daring to go it alone while the Moslems sought and seek to convert the world to Moslemism within which the Semites are the preeminent holy people. A nation of priests as the Bible says.
Thus while it might be possible for the largest sub-species as represented by the Chinese to overrun the world much more effectively than the HSiis and IIIs did, it would be equally possible for the Moslems to convert the Chinese with the Semites taking a position analagous to ERB’s Holy Therns in Barsoom.
Thus while stymied for the time being in the West Moslems were increasing by leaps and bounds in the East. They may have looked stagnant from the West but they were dynamic indeed when viewed from the East.
Having been disturbed in their homeland the Chinese and Japanese Mongolids began sending colonies out wherever they could be received and by this time all space on the earth was fully occupied. This wasn’t therefore the loud noisy colonization of the HSIIs & IIIs but a more peaceful infiltration. A lot of smuggling of small groups into the United States and Canada went on, as it still does. Large colonies were sent to South America. Peru passed a Chinese Exclusion Act for much the same reason the United States did. Didn’t really have anything to do with color, it was that the countries were being taken over by foreign elements. Japan had colonies in Brazil, Colombia and other South American States.These colonies were designed to retain their ethnic origins so that they wouldn’t assimilate. I’ve met Japanese from Japan via Colombia who were smuggled across the border from Tijuana.
Thus on the world scene Darwinian clash of sub-species continued outside Asia while the Mongolids were successfully expelling the HSII and III invaders from Asian homelands. This is essentially what the much despised Lothrop Stoddard, Harvard graduate, too, was pointing out.
In the United States the immigrating sub-species had to disarm the dominant Anglo-Saxon hierarchy. As pointed out, led by the West Indian immigrant First Born that sub-species was organizing its own conquest of America and Europe. Their own population was increasing prodigiously around the world. Even in the face of tremendous immigration into the United States the percentage of First Born has never declined but has increased. Today in the fact of even greater immigration FB percentages have increased to fifteen percent vis-a-vis HS II and III.
Under the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement between the US under TR and Japan the Japanese ‘voluntarily agreed’ to restrict the flow of immigrants. The US, a sovereign nation, accepted this ‘compromise.’ The early Japanese immigrants had been nearly one hundred percent male. These womanless men now demanded women so the other half of the invasion in the form of picture brides arrived swelling the Japanese population past double. The so-called Issei are the first generation born in America. As their parents paired up at the same time the whole next generation came of age about the time of 12/7/42. An interesting immigration fact. Thus by taking advantage of HSII and III goodwill the immigration agreement was evaded.
So the flow of populations contesting the same territories with the same Darwinian economic needs came into further conflict.
The Jewish race of the Semites had been poised to transfer their entire East European population tothe United States just as the Great War broke out. Now with the war over the Semites renewed their plans. However there had been problems with immigrants from the Central Powers including their Irish allies during the war which sent shivers down the spines of the Anglo-Saxons. TR himself voiced the fear that the United States had become merely ‘an international boarding house.’ So people do catch on after it’s too late.
After a hundred years of unrestricted immigration, a golden period worldwide actually well worth study, the opponents of immigration carried the day severely restricting immigration if not closing the door completely.
This action enraged the Judaic race of Semites who considered it their go-given right to go where they wanted when then wanted and whether a country wished to receive them or not. But there is more than way to skin a cat. The Anti-Defamation League whose ostensible purpose was to prevent defamation wherever it might occur began a defamation campaign against anyone with an independent point of view that conflicted with their own in any way.
The ADL was lined up with the Communist?Red/Liberal Coalition. The combinatin effectively split and weadened the HSIIs and IIIs putting the subspecies at war with themselves, something like Cadmus throwing a stone among the indigenous peoples setting them against each other until they killed each other off making the Semitic conquest of Boeotia easy. Divide and conquer.
Led by the ADL whith its ever potent charge of anti-Semitism the Liberal coalition opened war on any dissidents. The idea was to discredit anyone whether they were concerned or merely passive who didn’t follow their program. Prime targets were Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. ERB made himself conspicuous when in reaction to the Bolshevik revolution he sent around a draft of the Moon Maid which in the original version was apparently little more than an expose codemning the Bolsheviks.
Stoddard and Grant who were competent scholars and men of good will were nevertheless characterized as hopeless bigots and anti-Semites thereby being easily disposed of. By the end of the decade they were neutralized and by the end of the thirties disposed of. Quite naturally the Liberal coalition denied any involvement.
As the thirties dawned there were major activities affot. In Asia, Japan which deeply resented HSII & III penetration, began a campaign to drive them out. Talk about the tail wagging ghe dog, their plan was to conquer Asia from Japan to Australia in the South, and India in the East. It staggers the imagination. Yet it was no less than England had done with the same population. But, different measures for different times.
When TR said ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ the audacity of the Japanese plan which required a very big stick was beyond their powers of execution. Nevertheless they first invaded Manchuria and then China itself.
In Europe, in reaction to defeat and the Judeo-Communist threat the Nazis under Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 which did not bode well for the world. In the United States also a disaster as big as Hitler and Nazis occurred when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President. That did not bode well for the United States. The world was then primed for the big explosion.
Perhaps because of the concept of Manifest Destiny under which the Red/Liberal tide was supposed to roll over the North American continent, jump the Pacific then race across China and Asia to return again to America in an unbroken wave of triumph the Red/Liberals looked upon the Chinese as a swell people who would offer no resistance to their goals, indeed, embrace and forward them. Thus in some sort of Disney fantasy China was seen as complicit in the Liberal design.
FDR was one devious son-of-a-gun. As the good guys were being attacked by the Japanese bad boys Roosevelt took it upon himself to aid the Chinese with American wherewithall. It would have been better to let the two combatants exhaust themselves and keep our ‘limitless’ resources to ourselves.
Remember that the Japanese hatred of the West was caused when the United States forced them out of their seclusion at gunpoing thereby emasculating them.
Now Roosevelt was trying to thwart their ends by disgorging America’s wealth on China. If you free your mind from false moral assumptions you wll see how stupid this was.
As an American I can do nothing but deplore Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor but as a psychologist and analyst I can see nothing but its inevitability as the result of the US’s inconsiderate actions.
The Japanese simply had to try to put a stop to American aid to China. Whatever the proof may be that FDR knew of Pearl Harbor before hand, if he didn’t know he was provoking such an attack he was denser than any man has a right to be which I don’t think he was.
In Europe the situation was intensified when the Communists elected sympathizers to most government who then formed a Popular Front against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Spain. The Roosevelt administration was a Popular Front government. On the religious front it was competition between Communism and established faiths.
To all appearances the Judeo-Communists had the Axis surrounded. Even before Hitler was elected the Jews of the United States were working hard to subvert him. Assassination attempts had already taken place. When FDR was elected, as with all Popular Front governments the Jews urged the United States to take first strike action against Germany.
As part of this program in the United States the Judeo-Communists demanded an Un-American Activities Committee by which unamerican meant non-Judeo Communist. In 1938 they succeeded when the House Un-American Activities Committee was created. To their disappointment the chairmanship escaped them going to a member who corrected believed that Communists were a bigger threat than Nazis. This infuriated Roosevelt.
When was was declared in Europe the American Judeo-Communists were for intervention. They changed their tune after the German-Soviet pact then changed back again after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
As can be plainly seen what is at stake here are sub-special interests rather than national ones. On 12/7/41 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. All the sub-species were at war.
The War fatally weakened the HSIIs and IIIs much as the percipient Lothrop Stoddard had predicted. In the aftermath of the War HSIIs and IIIs were expelled from Asia. Although preifly garrisoned with American troops there was no other action taken against Japan other than that they were set on their economic feet.
In 1948 the HSIIs and IIIs were driven from India.
In 1948 the Judeo-Semites occupied Palestine.
In 1948 the Chinese Communists were clearly going to be victors in China thusputting the Chinese squarely at odds with the West.
While for a few years the United States was in the enviable position of arbitrating world affairs, it chose to favor the non HSII and III subspecies over the ‘colored’ peoples thus further weakening HSIIs and IIIs.
When Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950 there had been little happening in his literary and business affairs for a decade. The only thing keeping the Burroughs literary legacy alive was his continuing popularity with the masses. You and me. But they could find few editions of any of the corpus to buy.
From 1945 to 1963 there was little of his literary oeuvre that was available although demand continued strong. For some strange reason ERB, Inc. refused to issue titles. Then in 1963 publishers seized on expired copyrights and the second boom in Tarzan began. Once more his message contained something of value for his readers. Let us now begin Book III of Something Of Value which cover the period from 1945 to 9/11/01 and the closing of the old dispensation and the beginning of the new.
The Age Of Aquarius was dawning.
Something Of Value Book II Part 3
February 5, 2008
Book II
Something Of Value
Part 3
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 3
Bad Motorcycle With The Devil In The Seat
Don’t go out tonight,
They’re sure to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.
-John Fogerty
(a.) The Evolution Of Religion 0-1875
Prior to, say, -800 the approximate date of Homer’s Iliad, religion was comprosed of all three facets of learning: Religion, Philosophy and Science. The reason for the Priesthood was intact. Then beginning with Homer in the Greek world, who was reverenced with good reason, learning became gradually secularized as the Pre-Socratics developed Philosophy and Science independently of the Priesthood. In the West this was the real deathblow to religion; in the Semitic East no such development took place. The Semites are incapable of either Philosophy or Science.
About this time also, Astronomy as a science developed, which doomed Astrology to insignificance although its traditions linger on as the world prepares for the Age of Aquarius. It will really happen too. Don’t ask me how, but it will, it is happening. If you want to read an excellent analysis of aspects of the Age of Pisces check out C.G. Jung. The amazing thing is that there is little to indicate a system for perpetuating this design of ancient times, no evidence of a secret society forwarding Astrological designs. The ancients having set the plan in motion apparently knew it would be self-perpetuating as individuals like myself, and I have no interest in Astrology per se would penetrate the workings of the design moving it forward whether advertently or inadvertently. But you have to look at it to see it. My interest was aroused when I detected a constant presence. I myself have no prejudices, I don’t dismiss phenomena out of hand. The Tarot has its significance also. You don’t have to believe it, you study its historical development.
Astrology was still a very active force as the Age of Pisces dawned. The Semitic Jewish reaction was based on the dawning of a new Age, the Piscean. When this mistaken adventure ended in 135 AD, when it became clear that the New Age meant little in concrete terms, although defeated militarily and dispersed from Palestine the Jews still had that old ace in the hole. Religion.
There was still the spiritual world. While the Rabbis censured Jesus of Nazareth as an imposter a cult of Jewish followers developed after the death of Jesus. The Jews in those days or just previous to the Jewish Wars had been active proselytizers. Large Jewish communities existed in all the cities of the Roman Empire including Rome itself. For various reasons these facts have been downplayed. Any serious historical study of the role of the Jews in the Roman Empire is severely discountenanced, at least in American Universities.
As orthodoxy required circumcision and following the ridiculous Jewish dietary laws, I mean, what makes wine kosher or not is whether it has been touched by non-Jewish hands somewhere in the winemaking process, the limits of conversion may have been reached. A lot of folks might think such a condition mere bigotry but I decline to comment. Paul realized this, thus he wisely discarded circumcision and the dietary laws in his version of Christianity. This at least made it possible to convert the Gentile although without bigotry Christianity could never have succeeded in being more than a prevalent religion. Persuasion can only go so far. A religion can’t get anywhere without bigotry.
After Constantine made Christianity the official religion, empowered, the Catholic Church went to work to suppress all other forms of thought, religious, philosophical or scientific. The academy of Plato was shut down while the library at Alexandria was burned to the ground.
Thus the Semito-Roman Catholic Church solidified its position as the official representative of Christ on Earth.
Now, after Jesus was crucified the remaining disciples and adherents were run to earth where possible and killed. It became expedient to flee into hiding. From this dispersal has arisen the tradition of the Holy Grail. This fabulous literary repository has come down to us attached to the exploits of King Arthur. Known to most through the collation of Mallory, the original documents run to tens of thousands of pages. The Vulgate-Lancelot alone is close to ten thousand 350-400 word pages.
The legends which begin with the crucifixion represent a secret history of Europe. There is much interesting investigation being forwarded on the topic currently by Laurence Gardner and his series of books, he can be accessed at his Mediaquest site on the web, and Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln in two interesting books: Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy. There are others but these two series are most direct. There’s a lot more actually but much of it is very speculative. Worth looking into though by the right minds.
According to these writers Mary Magdalen fled Palestine for Marseilles in southern France where she bore a son of Jesus. This son became the progenitor of the Merovingian line of kings of France. These in turn presented a challenge to the authority of the Semito-Roman Catholic Church. Thus the Church encouraged the usurpation of the throne by the line that would be known as Carolingian which when the Church succeeded in crowning Charlemagne the Holy Roman Emperor it gained the right to invest the royal houses of Europe. The Merovingians were thus dispossessed.
With the right to make or break kings in a quasi-theological empire the success of the Church was more of less assured although in a still very difficult political situation. Still, all Europe West of what became Russia was brought within its sway, hence the recent Polish pope.
Not content with leaving well enough alone the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries encouraged the recovery of Palestine from the Moslems. Contact in the East introduced two heresies which were to have a decisive and devisive impact on subsequent history down to the present day.
The Europeans chose to invade Palestine during the heyday of the chief of the assassin cult, Hassan i Sabbah. Thus while having only a limited military success, still a Christian presence was maintained for over two hundred years which is about as long as the United States had been in existence, the crusaders were infected with a heresy. At the same time the Cathar heresy was introduced into Europe from the East. The Cathars also known as the Albigensians, and the Knights Templar presented the Semito-Catholic Church with a soul destroying problem. This is where the Church met its Waterloo although it would be difficult to understand what else they could have done.
Westerners don’t seem to understand that if you’re going to interfere in other people’s lives you have to go all the way or suffer the consequences. The assassins of Hassan i Sabbah introduced a very potent brand of heresy into Europe in vengeance for the invasion of Palestine. Both examples have proven very pernicious and ought to have been suppressed.
The watchword of the Cathars is given expression in the Rabelasian phrase: Do What Thou Wilt. I haven’t read Nietsche but he gave a different formulation in ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted.’
Thus the Moslems through the Assassins were able to corrupt the morality of the West. Thus Cathars prospered across Southern France where the aurthority of the Semito-Catholic Church was challenged. If the Cathar heresy, really an error, grew the Church would find itself displaced.
The rule of the Church is that the Church cannot shed blood, which is why heretics were burnt, but they could get others to do it for them. Establishing the Inquisition to smell out heretics the Church called on the French crown to crusade against the Albigensians. What do you do with people who will believe differently than you do? As Victor Hugo said, you have to kill them so that a new world may arise. As Lenin and Stalin believed, you have to exterminate the recalcitrants. As Hitler said, there is the final solution. Well, that’s what they did to the Albigensians. The soldiers asked how they were to determine whether one was or wasn’t a Cathar, they were told to kill them all, God would know his own.
The devastation if not total was a very serious attempt.
Here you have one of those insuperable problems, what are you going to do? If you do nothing you lose, if you let God sort out his own, you lose. The Cathars would have been enough trouble but then the Church was faced with the Templar heresy. Same solution, same results.
The only consolation the Semito-Catholics had was that at about this same time the troops of Genghis Khan swept over the Middle East rooting the Assassins out of their ‘impregnable’ mountain fastness.
The result of the Church’s action and that of their royal accomplices was a seething hatred of both by the survivors who after all, believed nothing was true and everything was permitted. Dangerous people with dangerous ideas. Several subversive organizations arose, the Free Spirits, Beghards and Beguines who eventually came together as the Libertines in pre-Revolutionary France.
The Church demonized the survivors, according to Laurence Gardner as witches, hence the witch hunts. I’m not sure it is true but it does make sense, provides a rational motive for the persecutions. With the inquisition in place Europe was made a hell on Earth. Nevertheless learning wiggled out from under the suppression of the Church to flower forth as the Enlightenment. Thus after the Cathars and Templars Science presented a challenge to the Church which has been the knock out blow. Both the Semito-Catholic Church and the Semitic Jews were presented with a very difficult problem which no amount of persecution could resolve.
The Church has stubbornly clung to its authority giving up only a minimum to reason. The Inquisition itself was only discontinued in mid-nineteenth century. The Jews, on the other hand, were thrown into complete disarray by the Enlightenment at least in the West. The great bloc of Judaism in the Pale of Eastern Europe responded much more slowly but then very large numbers of that group emigrated to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where the religion faced even more serious challenges.
The Western Jews ran through a whole series of experimental forms before, under the influence of the Eastern Jews, the compromise of Zionism was evolved.
Along the way Marx, Einstein and Freud evolved political, physical and psychological pseudo-scientific ideas which had the effect of confusing the West.
Aiding the emergence of Science and the freeing of speculative religion from the suppression of the Church was the French Revolution of 1789. The Revolution was as epochal an event in the Piscean Age as the crucifixion of Christ. The Revolutionists restarted their calendar at year one which was probably symbolically correct.
It is probably signficant that Jean Baptiste de Monet, the Chevalier de Lamarck, was appointed professor of invertebrate zoology at the Paris Museum of Natural History in the critical year of 1793. As an evolutionist Lamarck preceded Charles Darwin. In his Tarzan And The Lion Man Burroughs mentions Lamarck along with Gregor Mendel and Darwin as well as the proposer of the germ theory of evolution, August Weismann, who Burroughs did not mention by name. While Burroughs played with evolution in many fantastic ways his playfulness was informed by a thorough grounding in the learning of his day.
One has to be very alert and attentive to see just how playful he is.
In Tarzan The Terrible the primitive species, mistakenly called races in most discussions, had tails. When Tarzan wishes to disguise himself he affixes a severed tail to his posterior. Now, there was a legend of a tailed people in the Congo Basin. The legend was based on the fact that this tribe affixed animal tails on their posteriors much as Tarzan does. Thus Burroughs combines evoltuionary speculation with historical legend and fact in a humorous episode. It’s possible he may have been waiting a hudred years anyone to get that joke. He picked up his information from H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa.
The Revolution itself was not as spontaneous as it is often depicted nor is the wanton destruction the result of a frustrated peasantry. The Revolution was planned and coordinated by the descendants of those very Albigensians and Templars Church and Crown had crushed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Albigenian and Templar heresies and error were thus released on the world in a more concentrated form than previously. The disorder in society today is caused by the followers of those errors.
Burroughs was born a short 70 some odd years after the failure of the Revolution. Sixteen years after Darwin released his Origin Of Species on the world. In between incredible advances were made. Champollion broke the hieroglyphic alphabet of Egypt opening the ancient world to us. The ancient civilizations of the Middle East were unearthed. Surely all those ruins Burroughs speaks of were influenced by those discoveries. Babylonians, Sumerians, Hittites, Cretans and other discoveries such as Schliemann’s unearthing of Troy and Mycenae. The Church was delivered one blow after another as the authority of its Holy Scriptures crumbled into falsehood.
At the same time a plethora of suppressed religious speculation burst the bonds of repression. Esotericists stumbled all over themselves to formulate doctrines. The Spiritualist movement sprang up fully formed like Athene from the forehead of Zeus. The greatest of the great, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, ransacked the religious speculative literature of the ages to reassemble it into a spectacular tour de force she called Theosophy. Just as religion, Philosophy and Science had diverged c. -800 she now tried to reunite them under one head. She couldn’t do it but her work is a magnificent effort none the less.
If you’ve got the time and patience The Book Of Urantia is an equally stunning tour de force. Great science fiction if nothing else.
Thus Edgar Rice Burroughs was born into this incredible religious, intellectual and scientific ferment. Learning had become so vast that no one mind could grasp all the details, but like Madame B, it were better to fail gloriously than never to make the attempt. Underneath all the foolery and fantasy of his fiction ERB went at with a will.
(b.) Relations Of The Sub-species 0-1875.
At the risk of being repetitious it might be appropriate here to quote Darwin again to keep the thought fresh in our minds:
Quote:
As the species of the same genus usually have, but by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distant genera.
Unquote.
So, when the Semites erupted from the desert the modern phase of competition between the Homo-Sapiens sub-species began. The populations had now expanded so that there was not room for all. One sub-species must drive out all the others. Thus the outer reality, or world of appearances, will and must triumph over the inner world of wishful thinking. So the world turns.
Darwin again:
Quote:
We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal-thrush in Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates. In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congenor. In Australia the imported hive bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. One species of charlock has been known to supplant another species, and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature, but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species had been victorious over another in the great battle of life.’
Unquote.
Let us never forget that there is a great battle for life while with Homo Sapiens we can precisely say why one species will be victorious. I cannot show the victory but I can show, for my purposes here, how the struggle progressed to 1875. The next section following will take us to 1950, the next after that to 9/11 and than a fictional effort will end with a possible scenario of the end of civilization as we know it.
The method followed by Homo Sapiens is easily learned, you just have to condition yourself to accept the facts, the outer reality rather than the inner world of wishful thinking. In encounters before this period the method was simple. A band of invaders conquered the indigenous folk, slew all the males, kept the females for themselves. In an evolutionary sense this is the natural method.
Amongst, lions for instance, a male is only allowed to enjoy his Pride for a limited time. Then a couple males gang up on him, driving him away. One of the new males then acquires the lionesses killing the former lion’s offspring at the same time. The complacent females then go into heat producing a new group of offspring for the new male. Simple. Why the simp lion helps his fellow for no reward is beyond me but it works the same way among Homo Sapiens.
So when the Saxons drove the Britons out of England into Brittany where the Britons conquered the natives, the Britons not only massacred the males but they cut the tongues out of the women so that the language wouldn’t be corrupted. Very offensive to our professed standards but completely within the range of normality. I mean, you know, get real. This sort of thing can and will happen again. Nazi Germany wasn’t any aberration. The Jews of today are calling for the extermination of one billion White people. This is a fact. Google Noel Ignatiev and see for yourself. Your problem will be that you just won’t take him seriously although the evidence is clearly before your eyes.
In this great struggle of life all sub-species of Homo Sapiens are more or less physically equal. Mental genetics have given HSII and III the edge in scientific intelligence. Along with the intelligence comes the ability to see farther and clearer so that lacking tunnel vision the will is blunted. Rather than following the ancient methods and disposing of indigenous peoples, which they could easily have done at the time, the HSIIs and IIIs created a legacy of ill will through their misguided benignity which at the end of this period began to come back to haunt them.
From the period of Mohammed the sub-species began to be moved around in earnest.
A legacy of the Semitic Moslem triumph was that the West was cut off from all intercourse with the East. The Moslems blocked all the formerly active trade routes. The legacy remains today when otherwise well educated historians know nothing of Africa and many points of the Near East.
Having conquered the Mediterranean littoral of North Africa the Semites began the penetration of sub-Saharan Africa. Superior in both intellignece and will to the First Born the Semites treated them as though they were mere animals, intelligent Apes. If the African slave trade hadn’t existed before, it began then. It was brutal.
Many Africans converted to Moslemism because it gained them immunity from being enslaved. They in turn captured non-Moslem Africans to sell to the Arabic Semites. This Moslem African slave trade began c. +700 and continues to the present day although the Semites will deny it.
North of Arabia the Moslems captured part of the Byzantine Asian lands while occupying Persia, central Asia and parts of India plus a fair penetration into China. Today if one includes Pakistan, Bangladesh and India as a unit the Indian subcontinent is predominantly Moslem.
In the West the Moslems were slowly driven from Spain which was accomplished just as the Ottoman Turks who had invaded the Middle East from Central Asia destroyed the last vestiges of the Roman or Byzantine Empire.
The Ottomans then began the conquest of the Balkans moving into the Ukraine, Romania and Hungary to the very Gates of Vienna before the combined forces of Austria, Poland and Russia drove them back to the present borders just as Edgar Rice Burroughs was being born. An incredibly long struggle that was just a pause in hostilities. After that defeat the Ottomans were known as ‘the sick man of Europe.’
During this entire period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the fifteenth century Europe was in turmoil as society reformed from a congeries of Germanic tribes into a semblance of the modern nation states.
In 1492 a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus changed the direction of European society. Cut off from the East by the Moslems who took advantage of straddling the trade routes to charge exorbitant prices for Easter luxuries, Portugal led European exploration of the world circumnavigating Africa finding an ocean route to the Orient thereby bypassing the Arabs eclipsing their prosperity sending them into complete stagnation. Maybe this is what Bernard Lewis means by ‘something went wrong.’
Columbus found the islands of the Caribbean Sea occupied by the Caribs. Here we can see clearly Darwin’s dilemma resolved. Between the introduction of virulent diseases to which the Caribs were unacclimated and brutal treatment the Europeans like the Asian cockroack drove their predecessors before them. What had been a Carib lake became a European lake and would soon become an African lake.
The islands were perfect for the labor intensive sugar industry but the Europeans didn’t want to do the intensive labor themselves. They in turn went to the great slave capitol of the world which the Semites had not yet exhausted to bring large numbers of the First Born out of Africa. Like all ruling classes the HSIIs and IIIs having displaced the native Caribs, were now displaced by the First Born who at present have possession of the Caribbean Islands.
So now if Darwin were alive he could see how it works. Caribs>HSIIs & IIIs>First Born. Simple.
The Spaniards also overran Mexico, Central America and South America. Here their numbers were few in comparison with the indigenes who were apparently of a hardier stock than the Caribs. The Spaniards were able to maintain their dominance over the indigenes of the area. Even today the President of Mexico is of obvious European descent while the peons are Indios.
Following Columbus’ lead the English and French invaded further North in lands that became the United States and Canada.
Once again here we can plainly see how one species of Homo Sapiens displaces another just as one species of swallow did to its great congenor.
The new invaders from Europe displaced the native Homo Sapiens along the seaboard then as their population steadily increased they rolled the aboriginals back before their advance. There was no attempt at extermination although there was callous disregard for life in the human sense. In the evolutionary sense there was no consideration of aboriginal rights.
At the same time the First Born were removed from Africa to serve as laborers in the English colonies of North America. The First Born would never have left Africa had they not been removed by the Semites and HSII and III. The First Born secured no presence in the Middle East with whatever implications that holds, but from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States First Born territories were extended greatly.
The orginal HSIII population which originally controlled Central Asia was either driven from the area by invading Mongolid tribes or exhausted their numbers migrating West. As numerous HSIII populations have existed in the Caucasus and in other pockets of central Asia the latter is unlikely. The HSIIs were undoubtedly driven before the Mongolids in the Darwinian sense. the Mongolids first made their appearance in the West with the fifth century Huns. They swept all before them until defeated in what amounts to a last ditch stand by the French. From the Huns forward Central Asia belonged to the Mongolids.
Then in the thirteenth century on the heels of the Western Crusades Genghis Khan organized the Central Asians to conquer both the Chinese Mongolids in the East as well as sweeping West to overrun Russia and Eastern Europe to the North before retiring back into the Steppes from which they exercised hegemony over Russia for hundreds of years.
To the South the Mongolids rolled over the Moslems before being defeated in Mesopotamia then, again, retiring back into the Steppes.
The russians eventually threw the Mongolid yoke off, then by running gunboats on the Volga they were able to prevent the Mongolid hordes from crossing. Thus Central Asia was brought under control.
The French and English quickly followed the Portuguese into the East. By then the Spanish had already seized the Philippines. European religious interference caused the Japanese to close their borders to both ingress and egress. From the early seventeenth century to nearly the birth of ERB Japan was isolated taking no part in world history.
With either superior luck or organization the English branch of HSII and III was able to be the most influenctial branch in the East. All of India was brought under their control, both Hindus and Moslems. Southeast Asia acknowledged at least the hegemony of England. The Dutch seized Indonesia while the French annexed Indo-China.
England, France and Germany were in the process of annexing China itself when they were interfered with by the United States. As usual the United States with so-called good intentions produced the opposite result. John Hay of the United States announced his Open Door Policy in regard to China forcing the European branches to back down from their concept of spheres of interest. America has been a very destructive force in world politics.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lacking sufficient colonists of their own, England began moving Indians and Chinese from their homelands into their colonies. Thus these peoples who up to that point had been quite content to remain where they were realized the advantages of colonization themselves. Before too long they would in their turn be colonizing Europe and the Americas.
Although Chinese and Japanese migrations will fall mainly in the period after ERB’s birth, well before mid-nineteenth century the Chinese had begun a substantial migration to the West Coasts of the Americas. In 1849, the time of the California gold rush, they represented a very substantial percentage of the West Coast population. It was because of the Chinese that Dennis Kearney announced that California was White Man’s Country.
Fearful of being overrun by the Chinese, which was a very well founded fear, Kearney led the effort for a congressional law excluding Chinese from immigration. This law was secured in 1882. It was repealed or superseded by the 1965 revision of the immigration act which was promoted by the Semitic Jews.
Americans concentrate only on what happens in this country but in fact once stirred up by the British the Chinese began to emigrate to all parts of the world as circumstance allowed. Americans refuse to allow volition to any other people assuming the role of world directors is some sort of perversion of Manifest Destiny
End Of Part III. Go to Part IV.
Tarzan The Untamed
January 3, 2008
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#7 Tarzan The Untamed
By
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs seems to be searching for his sexual identity in Tarzan The Untamed. The untamed may refer to the notion that he may be married but Emma has not domesticated the roaring Lion Man.
On my first reading of the novel I merely picked up the surface story, that, to tell the truth, I don’t find very interesting perhaps even implausible and ridiculous. On the second and third readings however the story behind the story, ERB’s psychological dilemma begins to emerge coloring the story with interest.
The story even begins to assume a certain beauty, a poetic shimmer, that takes form as you stare into it. I began to relate Untamed to other novels and stories, that seemed to me to be related and partake of the same dilemma. I don’t know that I can successfully relate them to Untamed but I’ll give it a shot.
For the last few years shifting around in the back of my mind have been the tales of E.T.A. Hoffman. Just a moment ago as I write this I finished another tale of the German romantics, a charming story that I recommend highly, Undine, by Friedrich de la Motte-Fouque. And finally although this may be difficult to see Fyodor Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Untamed begins with the murder of Jane, Burroughs aspect of female sexuality, and Tarzan’s killing of the panther or his emasculated sexuality that manifests itself as a homosexual latency.
One then is led to believe that by killing sexual desire Tarzan or ERB believes that he has eliminated the troubling sexual ambivalence of his character. Yet, just a few pages on they flicker to life again in the character of the putative German spy Bertha Kircher. Tarzan first sees Kircher as a woman in the German camp so grasping at the obvious he assumes that she is a German spy. He doesn’t realize and we won’t be told until the end of the story that she is a double agent. In reality she is an English spy posing as a German spy. There’s a complexity there that eludes me at the moment.
She is thus introduced to Tarzan as a woman. The next time he sees her is as a man disguised as a British agent in the English camp. He doesn’t recognize her although he know he has seen him somewhere before. Thus the old sexual ambivalence resurfaces. In what seems to be your standard adventure story delicate psychological nuances begin to flicker around the action story like St. Elmo’s Fire. No matter what the surface story is about the secondary story is about something else.
La Motte Fouque in his Undine also addresses the problem of a man faced with a sexual dilemma that lies within. The path is clear for the hero, Huldbrand, it is only his own weakness that creates the problem for him. In Huldbrand’s case his decision is between two women amidst elemental forces of nature that contrast with the elemental human nature. Undine is a story of astonishing beauty that I can only slaughter in interpreting . I highly recommend you read it. For those deeply into fantasy you will find Undine as fantastic as anything you have ever read; for those into myth and fairytale it is a masterpiece of the kind. Anyone who reads around in this area will have heard it mentioned. I have known of the title for many years but recently in my researches into H.G. Wells it was mentioned that Undine was a favorite of his. I thought it necessary background so I added this gorgeous story to my memory stacks. I should have waited so long; it is a superb Anima-Animus story.
In the December 14th ERBzine George McWhorter provided a list of a few post-WWII books that ERB read. As ERB titles the list, a few of the books he has read, and the list is astonishingly long from a few one can only guess that ERB’s full list must have a couple hundred or more. As reading was a lifelong habit for him and if he consumed titles at that voracious pace then it is truly difficult to guess how many books he read from, say, 1888 to 1910 just before he began writing. Of course his potential list to select from before 1910 was much shorter than ours is today. Titles as obscure today as Undine were relatively well known then. I may be wrong but I pick up hints of Crime and Punishment in ERB’s corpus from time to time. Certainly by his WWII list he had crime on his mind.
We do know that the stories that disappeared into his capacious mind from the period before 1910 gestated for decades in the back of his mind finally finding expression thirty or forty years later. I’m thinking of George W.M. Reynold’s Mysteries Of The Court Of London that burst forth in the 1938 version of The Lad And The Lion. So while I can’t say for certain that ERB read these three authors there is a certain wistfulness and fairy tale quality to the story of Tarzan, Bertha Kircher and Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick that reminds one of the three authors that I have mixed up with Untamed.
So, a woman named Bertalda sends the knight Huldbrand into the elemental forest to prove his love for her. Thus Huldbrand goes to a destiny he never imagined. In the sense of C.G. Jung’s collective unconscious which as I interpret as a set of symbols common to the Western mind, Burroughs also sends Tarzan and his two sexual identities into the elemental jungles of Africa.
La Motte-Fouque invents the water spirit Kuhleborn to forward the action. The presence of so much water indicates that the action takes place in the subconscious of Huldbrand.
Water plays a very different role in Burroughs’ story. In his tale Tarzan braves a watered land to traverse eight very deep and steep ravines that become progressively drier until in the last he almost dies of thirst. As Burroughs’ story covers the four years in his life from late 1914 until mid-1919 one may assume that he had eight bouts of progressively severe depression the eighth and last occurring as he writes his story.
On the other side of the last canyon the well watered jungle begins again. Thus the main story of Tarzan, Bertha and Smith-Oldwick takes place on the edges of the forest and a meadow.
In La Motte-Fouque’s story the elements had set up the conflict from the beginning. As we are told Kuhleborn stole the baby Bertalda away from her parents in an apparent drowning. He then restored a child to the bereaved parents with the child Undine who was actually a water sprite. Bertalda was left by the side of the road where a noble couple found and adopted her. She is the lost daughter of the now aged couple of Undine’s adoptive parents to which Kuhleborn now leads Huldbrand.
Undine’s parents live on an isolated peninsula. As soon as the storm drives Huldbrand to the peninsula the elemental Kuhleborn in the form of a raging torrent turns the peninsula into an island from which there is no escaping. Huldbrand and Undine are thus thrown together. Elemental spirits have no souls. This notion would certainly have had great appeal for Burroughs for whom men without souls was a preoccupation. Undine can only acquire a soul, which she greatly longs for, from the love of a man who has one. She therefore in effect seduces Huldbrand. Kuhleborn disapproves but as to a point Undine’s magic is stronger than his he is reluctantly forced to accede on certain conditions.
A wandering priest is tossed up on shore by Kuhleborn who ties the knot for Undine and Huldbrand. They return to civilization and Berthalda where the conflict between a human woman with a soul and a water sprite without one puts Huldbrand to the test.
So Tarzan who is first associated with Bertha Kircher is once again presented with his emasculation conflict when Smith-Oldwick appears in the picture. The name Smith occurs in Burroughs’ work with some frequency while Old-wick may have sexual connotations unless I’m being too Freudian.
Before Smith-Oldwick does appear Tarzan has to cross the continent from East to West. His wish is to return to his father’s cabin, build an addition or two to make it more roomy and comfortable then settle in as a sort of gentleman farmer. Ah, to be so world weary. And yet that is what Burroughs is about to do.
In a rather remarkable episode Tarzan is crossing Africa when he comes upon Bertha Kircher out there somewhere. He takes her captive but for some unknown reason doesn’t relieve her of the pistol at her side. Even stranger he walks along in front of his captive. Bertha not slow to grasp an opportunity reaches up and lays the butt of her pistol alongside the back of the Big Fella’s head. There’s one bash in the head so far.
Bertha takes off for the railroad leaving Tarzan lying face down in the trail. As he lies Sheeta the panther comes upon him. This presents a sexual problem difficult of analysis. Does it mean that Tarzan is unaware of his attraction to Bertha or what? Tarzan is all but dead as Sheeta prepares to spring on him when who should appear but the Lion whose will Tarzan broke earlier in the story. Now totally devoted to his oppressor he kills Sheeta. Tarzan regains consciousness to find himself nose to nose with Numa. Reminds you of that horrid joke Hillman told a while back about the elephant. In this case it was the same lion.
So the Lion and Tarzan are united in spirit. Tarzan is not yet known as the Lion Man but he will be. In any event the Lion is a guardian spirit for him. In the second book after this one, perhaps reflecting this lion Tarzan will raise and tame the Golden Lion who will be his helpmate and guardian angel. I suspect that the lions Tarzan kills would have been tigers if someone hadn’t objected to the fact that there are no tigers in Africa. In some ways panthers are substitutes for the tiger.
Relieved to find that this lion is his lion Tarzan gets up giving the lion a pat and then trots off down the trail in search of Bertha. In a sort of hobo flashback Bertha finds the train line and hops a freight a few steps ahead of the White Ape. Tarzan misses the connection so we find him forsaking the middle terraces for a trudge down the tracks into town.
I don’t know how many people find these two sequences funny but I do.
Tarzan loses track of Bertha so he begins the long walk to Gabon. Here he has to traverse the eight deep canyons. These canyons have vertical walls while being very deep so that even for the Ape Man these thing become too difficult. Each crevasse gets drier and drier so Tarzan gets weaker and weaker being deprived of, as it were, the feminine water of life. By the time he hits the eighth canyon he is spent. I mean, he has had it. This may be as close to death as the Great Tarmangani has ever come.
He lays down in a manner that indicates he will never get up. The chapter is titled Blood Will Out. A little double entendre. A vulture descends to wait for his meal to die. Instead Tarzan grabs the vulture by the neck sinking his strong white teeth into it throat. Here’s the joke: Blood Will Out. Tarzan’s inherited greatness appears while the vulture’s blood saves his life. Tarzan sucks the vulture dry gaining liquid refreshment while eating the flesh. He now has just enough strength to climb out. He discovers he has crossed the desert and is now in a watered land.
One may assume then that Burroughs has fought off several bouts of severe depression from 1914 to 1919.
Back up on the surface he discover Bertha Kircher in the possession of a Black German trooper. At the same time Smith-Oldwick is flying on a reconnaissance mission when he develops engine trouble landing in a meadow. He whips out his monkey wrench, fixes the problem but before he can take off he is captured by the locals.
Thus he Tarzan and Bertha are brought together. So Tarzan having thought he had resolved his sexual hang-ups at the beginning of the book now learns he hasn’t. The old ambivalence returns in the persons of Bertha and Percy Smith-Oldwick.
In a series of interesting adventures the three Whites are brought together. Tarzan’s male figure falls in love with Bertha. The plane is relocated. An adventure with Usanga the Black German soldier intervenes that is not germane here. Tarzan’s intention is still to go off alone to his father’s cabin so he sees Smith-Oldwick and Bertha off as they begin the flight back to Kenya. Thus we have a second resolution to Burroughs’ sexual dilemma. He packs his sexual problems in a plane and flies them off higher above him than he is high above his daily cares in the trees. He is seen standing in a tree safely above it all watching the plane disappear into the distance. The plane is soaring very high over the tree tops when it takes a dive back to earth. Thus that dream of Burroughs’ getting rid of his ambivalence crashes.
Even this attempt to resolve his sexual dilemma is doomed to failure. He can’t abandon the two so he starts back into the desert from which he almost met his death. His sexual ambivalence has landed in the eighth and most desolate canyon. Undaunted Tarzan returns to near certain death to resolve his problem. The three are in an impossible situation from which it appears that there is no escape.
There he learns that a very unintelligent vulture had apparently mistaken the plane for a dead something. Descending on it the vulture became entangled in the propeller. Never one to lose a chance to bash someone/anyone on the head Burroughs has the bird break a piece of the propeller loose that bashes Smith-Oldwick in the forehead. The bashing definitely establishes Smith-Oldwick as Burroughs’ sexual alter-ego as he presumably now has the same scar on his forehead that both Burroughs and Tarzan sport.
The vulture is an ancient symbol of the mother. One can’t be too sure how aware Burroughs may have been of this but in the Jungian sense of the collective unconscious the symbol would have or may have suggested itself from the common fund. As a student of Africa Burroughs would certainly have had plenty of time to consider vultures especially as his idol Rider Haggard includes vultures in most of his African novels.
If Burroughs is using the vulture as a symbol for his mother that opens the interesting problem of what exactly his relationship to his mother was. First Tarzan strangles, drinks the blood and eats the flesh of the vulture, with perhaps a very sly joke of blood will out, and then the vulture attacks his sexual identity destroying any chance Burroughs may have had of successfully resolving the issue. I merely raise the point.
Having been bashed but not knocked unconscious Smith-Oldwick recovers in time to ease that airplane down. Tarzan arrives but there seems to be no hope of the three leaving the canyon alive.
At this point the residents of the lost civilization of Xuja capture them. Once again not germane to my point here after a series of very interesting hair raising adventures the trio is rescued by some British troops searching for Smith-Oldwick.
Burroughs and Tarzan still have to resolve the sexual dilemma.
The rescue officer advises Tarzan that Jane is not after all dead. This fact apparently resolves the problem for Tarzan. Bertha and Smith-Oldwick return to get married while Tarzan now psychically reunited with Jane returns to East Africa to begin the search for Pal-Ul-Don rather than returning to his father’s cabin.
We don’t know where this leaves Burroughs in August of 1919, more or less the anniversary of the beginning of the Great War in 1914, when he finished the book. We don’t know what his relations with Emma were except that possibly they had reached an accord psychologically.
The story began in Tarzan’s mythical Africa during the War. In the novel the story must take place in 1914-15 but in real life the war ended in November of 1918. This probably coincides with Tarzan drifting off from East Africa back West to Gabon. At the same time in real life Burroughs left Chicago in January 1919 moving West to Los Angeles.
So the village of Usanga in the middle of Africa must represent Chicago. The lost city of Xuja that is located in a desert valley watered by canals brought from a distance must represent the move to LA. So that Burroughs is recording his sexual dilemma and also the move from Chicago to LA against the background of the Great War. Pretty nifty footwork.
He and Emma must have been together as it is very difficult to believe he would have absented himself from her and Tarzana so that this long separation of Tarzan from Jane must represent a mental estrangement from Emma. Perhaps the strain of the move was more than she could bear.
In the next novel Tarzan The Terrible Tarzan makes the long trek to the lost land of Pal-Ul-Don in search of Jane. While the succeeding novel Tarzan And The Golden Lion opens with Jane, Jack and Tarzan returning from Pal-Ul-Don reunited again. At that time there is a distinct coolness between Tarzan and Jane. Whatever reconciliation took place between Emma and Burroughs it was less than satisfactory on Burroughs’ side.
In Golden Lion the two discover a lion cub on the trail that Tarzan takes home to raise as the Golden Lion. The Lion is always cool toward Jane while seeming to protect Tarzan from her. As soon as the lion is mature and trained Tarzan takes off to visit La at Opar. In this instance he and La come close to being a couple while the Golden Lion becomes a close male companion.
Thus Bertha and Smith-Oldwick have turned into La and the Golden Lion. Still unable to resolve his real life problem Burroughs ends Golden Lion by having Tarzan return to Jane. Burroughs has now resolved his emasculation problem by having the Golden Lion as Tarzan’s male buddy. As a beast he is not threat to Burroughs’ masculine identity. The Golden Lion remains Tarzan’s male pal throughout the remaining novels.
Now I have to return to Tarzan The Untamed. This is a very complex novel and I don’t know if I can do it justice.
Edgar Rice Burroughs As An Outsider
November 25, 2007
Edgar Rice Burroughs As An Outsider
By
R.E. Prindle
…the great cats roamed this strange valley of the gorillas.
=Edgar Rice Burroughs
And the Great White Ape stood before the wall that surrounded London of Africa. Cats, gorillas, walls, doors, London England deep in the Heart of Darkness…he was the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan Of The Apes.
Tarzan is alone as usual as was, one suspects, his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. The year is 1933 both in Burroughs’ imaginary Africa and temporal Los Angeles where the writer plied his trade.
After a lifetime of trying to break into society Burroughs has Tarzan standing outside the wall of London into which he must break like a burglar or thief in the night.
Within the walls is the citadel of ERB’s desires, the great city on the hill, the castle of redemption. Now fifty-eight years old Burroughs had achieved all the material attributes of success only to have the prize dashed from his hands.
Symbolically he enters the castle of his dreams to find instead only a prison. The long climb up the stairway to heaven leads only to jail.
Nineteen thirty-three was the one hundredth anniversary of his father’s birth. The old ghoul who had imprinted him so evilly had come back from the grave to haunt him, to deny him what he had worked so hard to attain.
As in real life where MGM had stripped him of his life’s work in one deft move so now in his imagination his castle was destroyed by a raging fire storm. Symbolically he portrays his relationship with his father as an old coot who had led him around with a halter round his neck. In his great apocalyptic dream ERB reverses the roles and puts the halter about his father’s neck.
Too late ERB realized he had signed away his great creation to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In a desperate attempt to reclaim him ERB formed a movie company in which for a logo he adopted the MGM symbol but replaced the roaring lion, Leo, with an image of Tarzan shouting Tar-man-gan-eeee. ERB failed to detourne the image and MGM added insult to injury by forcing ERB into exile in Hawaii. Now seventy years old our big cat was exactly where he had been in Chicago when he entered manhood- on the other side of the wall. Still outside. It wasn’t supposed to be that way as Burroughs lamented.
How did it come to pass? How could he succeed so magnificently and yet fail so egregiously? How could life treat him so bad. ERB was just born under a bad sign.
His life began propitiously. He was in effect a little prince in his family for his first seven or eight years but then things began to mysteriously unravel and the little prince became a pauper. And that was more or less how ERB explained his life to himself. The three most influential books in his life were Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.
Burroughs apparently understood his life at least until 1930 in terms of these three books. The Prince became a Pauper then a Prince again. Little Lord Fauntleroy, a disinherited prince lived his young life as a pauper realizing his destiny as a prince at last. These two books were published in Burroughs’ childhood. One assumes he first read them as a boy.
The Virginian was published in 1902. Burroughs said that he had read all three books six or seven times by the early twenties. It is impossible to know when he read The Virginian the first time but as his life was in a turmoil during 1902-03 and ‘04 I wouldn’t think that his first reading was before ‘05 but one can’t be certain.
It would appear that ERB modeled his adult life on Lin McLean, the Virginian.
McLean was essentially a loner who went West to Wyoming much as ERB had repeatedly gone to Idaho. Wister tells the story of the famous Johnson County War through the eyes of his hero, McLean. ERB was in Idaho when the Johnson County War was in progress so Burroughs would have understood the novel with an intimacy denied the rest of us. McLean was a Tarzanic figure who wooed and won a school marm who was culturally far above him. This was perhaps not unlike ERB and Emma. Emma always referred to ERB as a lowbrow.
The most memorable episode in The Virginian is McLean’s marriage. He and his bride honeymoon in the wilds, in romantic scenery quite reminiscent of Burroughs’ dream Africa. Perhaps his taking Emma to Idaho in 1903 was an attempt to recreate this romantic honeymoon. A basis of Tarzan then can be found in Lin McLean the silent Virginian. Also ERB’s apparent vision of himself.
As Burroughs complained that ‘it wasn’t supposed to be like this’ his condition changed began to go wrong about the fifth grade. Here his father began his role as the monstrous ‘God’ of Tarzan And The Lion Man. ERB had attended Brown School up to this point. At this age his father moved him from Brown and sent the young boy to, of all places, a girl’s school. One can only imagine the young boy’s anguish at attending a girl’s school. ERB’s connections with his early schoolmates was disrupted. He had barely begun his tenure at the girl’s school when his father transferred him to a Latin school named Harvard for two and a half years. There is no indication ERB formed any abiding friendships at Harvard School.
While the kids in his neighborhood were walking to Brown everyday ERB was riding his pony alone to Harvard. Undoubtedly the students of Harvard were drawn from all over Chicago so that apart from seeing his fellows in class ERB had little else to do with them.
His father then pulled him from Harvard School sending him off to his brothers’ ranch in Idaho. At this point then he had no contact with his fellow Chicagoans while he was thrown into a delightful situation but one in which he associated with rough cowboys with little education while he attended no school himself.
Why his father was doing this is open to interpretation. Certainly he must have known what the effects would be on his son. His father’s next move was to transfer young ERB to the snobbery of the East at Phillips Academy where he essentially flunked out within a year.
One can only imagine the turmoil in the young man’s mind as he returned to a Chicago he no longer knew and more importantly where no one knew him. It doesn’t seem possible that he could have any but a few acquaintances in Chicago to whom he would still have been a near stranger. So already at sixteen young Burroughs had been placed beyond the pale of society. He was already an outsider. The most he could hope for was to be allowed to return to Brown to finish high school. There at least he had a viable connection with Emma however he would be a rough cut diamond lacking the polish and sophistication that would have appealed to Emma’s father.
Such an opportunity was not to be. At this point ERB’s father placed him in the Michigan Military Academy. ERB described the Academy as a place where parents warehoused their young juvenile delinquents. The resentment is clear in ERB’s attitude. Indeed he rebelled at this latest insult from his, by this time, inscrutable father.
The boy ran away from the MMA returning to his father’s house in Chicago. One wonders if he hopped freights to get there. One can only imagine the anguished pleading of Burroughs as he begged, perhaps on his knees, to be allowed to stay home and attend Brown. His old martinet of a father would have none of it. He packed the boy off again to the Military Academy.
Military Academy! How distasteful the very sound is. To be packed off again to a place where you knew no one and they as ERB believed, were juvenile delinquents. One can only imagine how crushed the boy’s spirit was. He became a class clown. What his fate might have been if his Commandant hadn’t been one who commanded his respect by the name of Charles King one can only guess. King who was not as well remembered by his classmates as he was by Burroughs nevertheless he bucked the boy up perhaps saving his life. At any rate Burroughs developed a dual personality as a class clown while at the same time being responsible enough to lead the football team to undreamed of heights while becoming an outstanding horseman and trick rider.
It was at the MMA that Burroughs formed the only long term friendship of which we are aware; this was a young man from Beatrice, Nebraska by the name of Herb Weston. Weston’s correspondence with Burroughs over the next forty years or so has been preserved for us by Matt Cohen in his book Brother Men.
Burroughs knew Weston only from September to May of the year before he left to join the Army. They saw each other but seldom after that apparently neither corresponding or meeting from 1896 to 1905 or so, but still the friendship flourished in later years.
In 1896 ERB joined the Army requesting the worst post they had and that was willingly given to him. So at this point ERB severed whatever and all ties that he had with anybody. He was the quintessential outsider. He was flying solo.
He apparently took a train to the end of the line wherever that may have been taking a stage coach into his post, Fort Grant, Arizona.
Whatever his fantasy of the Army was he was immediately disabused. He and four other fellows formed an informal club romantically named The Might Have Seen Better Days Club. There’s an element of self pity in the name. It deserves further comment.
The name implies a certain amount of depression. That is implied in Burroughs’ asking for the worst post in the Army. Only one fairly deeply depressed would ask for such a post. It’s the same as the fit of depression in which men used to join the French Foreign Legion.
Burroughs says he joined the Army with the intent of working his way up through the ranks to become an officer. I’m sure it didn’t take long to disabuse himself of that notion. Thus he began to petition his father to get him out of his commitment. His father had enough pull to do so.
So in 1897 he was back on the outside without a plan, presumably just as depressed. At that point in his life he was free to go anywhere, California, New York, the Bay Area, within a year the Yukon Gold Rush would be on. Heck he might even have traveled North with his future hero, Jack London. But ERB took his depression back home to Chicago.
Chicago was his home town but he knew no one there except Emma. ERB went to work for his father. Probably difficult enough but more importantly the office was located on Madison Avenue. That street was the main stem of Chicago’s huge hobo population. These were really outsiders, the men who didn’t fit in to use Robert Service’s memorable phrase.
ERB saw them everyday and must have spoken to many of them, had conversations so that he probably recognized some affinity with them. Hobos would certainly figure large in his writing from time to time.
He undoubtedly fantasized embracing the life of the road and may have on an experimental basis. He was to form a relationship with one of the foremost Hobo poets, H.H. Knibbs later in life. So the pull of the road was there.
He still had no idea what to do with his life. He had joined the Army without telling anyone including his future wife Emma Hulbert. She had sent a letter to him at Fort Grant in September of 1896. When he returned he discovered that he may have been away too long. As improbable as it may sound she was then being courted by a millionaire’s son, Frank Martin. As ERB had no real wish to be married he probably should have let Martin marry Emma.
It seems quite obvious Emma preferred the impoverished ERB to the wealth of Martin. These things obviously do happen. In the denouement thirty-five years later it would have been better for Emma if she had gone with Martin..
At this time ERB chose to return to Idaho. That didn’t work out well so he bounced back to Chicago. Now comes a very critical moment in his life. Perhaps Martin had been on the verge of success with Emma who may have been hurt and confused at the latest abandonment by the man she truly, truly loved.
When Burroughs returned heartening Emma once again Martin very obviously became exasperated at what he considered a bad penny who kept turning up at disadvantageous times.. It appears that he decided to settle ERB’s hash. Martin’s father was a railroad magnate possessing his own private rail car. Martin invited this nemesis of his to take a round trip to New York City with the return trip through Canada and Toronto.
It would appear that he set up a murder attempt to remove his rival in Toronto. On a night on the town in Toronto ERB was either lured into a fight with a couple thugs or accosted by them. The thug delivered a vicious blow to ERB’s forehead with a sap or leaded pipe that ripped his scalp open and laid ERB low.
While the injury was not obvious ERB was seriously hurt. Apparently internal bleeding formed a clot between his forebrain and skull hat had a profound effect on his personality as well as giving him excruciating headaches half the day for every day of his life at least through 1913-14.
Judging from his writing the pressure caused memory lapses during which he was unable to recall people he was familiar with. As this trait would not have been understood ERB was misinterpreted and become even more of an outsider. After his injury in Toronto ERB married Emma probably to spite Martin as he later said he regretted getting married. Nevertheless he now had a wife along with what must have seemed a very peculiar personality.
It is difficult to imagine what options ERB had open to him now that he had to abandon his rough and rowdy ways to take care of his young wife. Working for his father must have been a difficult experiences as it most often is for a son. In addition to that problem ERB came down with typhoid fever. The convalescence completely disrupted his finances. Now having excruciating headaches, a mind that just came and went and no money, no prospects, no future and little hope the man must have been plunged into the depths of despair.
Perhaps in all those Tarzan stories when Tarzan loses his memory they may reflect ERB’s actual experience at this time being periodically bereft of his memory for more or less short periods of time.
Obviously not thinking very clearly he decided to return to Idaho with his new wife and absolutely no prospects of making a living. Well, it worked for the Virginian.
Now, the Yukon Gold Rush had occurred in 1898. Out of that gold rush came a young writer by the name of Jack London. Burroughs was an inveterate reader in those days before movies, TV and radio so that his imagination was fired by London’s stories. London had also been a hobo as a boy.
On the way out to Idaho ERB had Emma riding in an open boxcar so as to comfort their dog. So in his strange way ERB was actually hoboing and doing it with his wife.
Two years later they returned once again to Chicago. Already an outsider ERB now embarked on a career that pushed him further out. Already declassed by his father’s treatment he now declassed himself further by taking an odd assortment of jobs. This period has not been inadequately covered in existing biographies. Perhaps the job that pushed him beyond the pale of social acceptability was his association with a patent medicine man by the name of Stace. Patent medicines were among the most disreputable vocations a man could have. ‘Snake oil’ pitchmen have been parodied in so many movies one has visions of their being run out of town one step ahead of the sheriff.
Burroughs association with Stace occurred just after the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and an expose of the business by Samuel Hopkins Adams. A most unpropitious time to be in the patent medicine business. Stace was run out of business by the authorities. It was probably at this time that Burroughs picked up his experiences with grand juries and the police that he displays in The Girl From Farriss’s
Rather than dissociate himself from Stace as he should have done ERB joined with him in a successor venture named Burroughs-Stace. This could not have helped his reputation but would have implicated him as a principal in the snake oil outfit. One can only believe that it wasn’t very desirable to know Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Thus as his mind began to jell around the fiction that would make him famous his prospects were getting slim and slimmer. Perhaps he was grooming himself for the solitary profession of writer.
His experiences and reading all came together in 1911 when he wrote and sold his first effort, A Princess Of Mars. Unusually for a new writer he had more than one good story in him so that within two years he had achieved literary success being able to quit his day job to take up writing full time.
2.
By this time ERB had been outside the loop for so long, from the fifth grade on that his behavior was gauche. He didn’t know how to behave or discourse in polite society. So at this point it didn’t matter how much money he made or how famous he became he was truly a man who couldn’t fit in. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his writing.
One is astonished that between 1912 and 1918, a mere six years, Tarzan became a household word. It was that by the time the first movie was released there was virtually no one in America who hadn’t heard the name Tarzan. This is a level of success rarely attained.
And yet one is mystified as to how this came about. Certainly the penetration wasn’t achieved by a pulp magazine like All Story. The fiction magazines while popular had limited distribution. If we are to believe the sales figures Tarzan Of The Apes had substantial success but nothing like the novels of Zane Grey for instance.
His publisher, McClurg’s made no effort to capitalize on the phenomenon. Their hard cover first issue was very limited in numbers going into reprint status almost immediately. At the end of the decade ERB was reduced to urging them to print at least 40,000 copies before they turned a book over for republication. McClurg’s was loath to do so and I have seen no evidence they did. So one has the phenomenon of Tarzan being a household word with no clear evidence of how it came to be.
Today such success would make an author a celebrity yet the evidence is Burroughs was scorned in his own home town of Chicago. The city had a vibrant publishing scene in those days. There were plenty of famous authors in town with clubs and gathering places yet Burroughs apparently was welcome in none of them.
It is true that he was a pulp writer which was the lowest rung on the literary ladder. It is possibly true that he was the first truly imaginative writer in the sense of today’s sci fi, horror and fantasy genres. One may argue that Wells was first and while his stories are highly imaginative they are still extensions of reality.
Burroughs severed the connection with reality; he deals in impossibilities as if they were possible. One can’t stretch reality far enough to possibly cover Mars, Tarzan’s Africa and Pellucidar. They are clearly impossible. The Land That Time Forgot? Get out of here. So, as an originator of something new, a term I hate to use, Burroughs was a pioneer way out in front of the van. Hence he would have been incomprehensible to the average mind. In the language of the fifties he would have been a phenom. Weird, strange and that’s the way he seemed to have been treated.
In today’s terms his personality would have been vulnerable. Already an outsider the doors were politely shut in his face. Indeed, if one reads his stories they are full of closed doors that won’t open or can’t be opened. In Tarzan And The Lion Man, and this is a great scene, one of an array of doors is standing ajar while all the others are shut tight. The one open door is a trap that puts Tarzan in prison.
So we may assume that all doors were closed to him in Chicago. Whether his reputation followed him or his subject matter put people off or a combination of the two ERB was firmly kept outside. Chicago had that unwanted sign upon its heart.
There was one club that was open to Burroughs. That club was a catch all called The White Paper Club that was open to anyone who made marks on white paper. I suppose that could include anyone who intended to write that novel but had yet to put pen to paper.
Thus the man who had created a household word was forced to mingle with anyone who had soiled a piece of paper. Is it any wonder that ERB wanted to move.
Porges records ERB’s farewell dinner as though it were some sort of complimentary send off but Mr. Prindle dissents.
Among a number of unusual things ERB did that I don’t want to go into here was to circulate the story that he was going West to raise prize hogs. Now, Carl Sandburg called Chicago the Hog Butcher to the World. So one wonders what ERB was thinking. He actually did raise hogs at Tarzana but pig farming darn near broke him.
I can only guess what his fellow White Paperers thought but drawn on the menu was a picture of a pig with wings flying West. If I were ERB I might laugh with the fellows but I wouldn’t think it was a very funny joke. After all the phrase ‘when pigs have wings’ means something impossible while if I were ERB I might think that pig meant me and I might think the message was ‘good riddance and keep going.’ But, maybe I’m hypersensitive.
At any rate Burroughs went and he didn’t come back. He never seemed to miss Chicago a lot although there are many references to the city in his later work so he kept a watchful eye on the town.
So, at the age of forty-three ERB began a new life in sunny SoCal. The world had changed: without possibly understanding why there was no place in the new world for people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Part of his problem was caused by himself. As a newcomer in town ERB took it upon himself to be morally outraged by Hollywood. Hollywood had itself outraged the morals of the nation so the town was tender and sensitive on the subject. By the time ERB published his book in 1923 Hollywood was mired in some serious scandals not least of which was the Fatty Arbuckle murder trials. ERB’s novel discussing the seedier side of Hollywood life offended some sensibilities. As a newcomer to Hollywood the novel, The Girl From Hollywood, was ill considered. While an excellent novel, in the circumstances it had been better left unwritten.
In combination with his novel the political situation of the world had changed. The World Revolution had succeeded in Russia in 1917. Everyone not in sympathy was anathema and ERB was not in sympathy. He was not loath to advertise this fact. Hence the Communists reacted: in the years 1920-24 his novels were neglected in Britain; they were under assault in Germany; his movie revenues dried up in Hollywood while one wonders if his books received the circulation their popularity demanded.
Another social issue forcing him to the outside was his response to a questionnaire forwarded to him from Chicago sent by the American Jewish Committee. The questionnaire apparently wanted to know his opinions on Jews- was he unequivocally a supporter or did he have reservations. ERB had a reservation that was reasonable but not reasonable enough for the American Jewish Committee. ERB was apparently black listed as all income from the movies ceased from 1921 to 1928. Tarzan was persona non gratis in Hollywood.
When his income dried up ERB was no longer able to support his magnificent estate of Tarzana. Thus began years of economic problems. Hollywood does not tolerate economic problems so there is no record of ERB having a social history in Tinseltown.
ERB began having problems with his publishers most likely because of his anti-Red politics. This resulted in his forming his own publishing company in 1930. So, really by 1930 ERB was virtually outside society. Like his creation Tarzan he was backing down a limb followed by a panther. Undoubtedly it was thought that he would fail as a publisher but he didn’t.
His movie fortunes had changed in 1928 when the ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, Jack Kennedy’s father, broke the black list and released a Tarzan movie.
This caused a reaction in the Jewish community that apparently sought to undermine the FBO film Tarzan And The Golden Lion that is available today and a very good silent film starring ERB’s son-in-law, James Pierce who draws a mean bow on the cover.
Two quick films were released by a Jewish film company that held the rights to two novels purchased in 1922 but never filmed. One of these is currently available Tarzan The Tiger while the other isn’t. Frank Merrill of Tarzan The Tiger isn’t a bad Tarzan either.
Apparently heads were put together for a long term solution to Burroughs. A plan was put in effect by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM. In 1931 ERB signed a contract with them that virtually stripped him of control of his creation. Although MGM’s 1932 Tarzan Of The Apes was a hit there is good reason to believe it was a clownish attempt to finish the career of Tarzan. No one was more surprised than MGM when the movie became a box office smash. This was the first sound movie and maybe the famous Tarzan yell, that also might have been meant as a joke, put the movie over. But the career of Tarzan was effectively out of Burroughs’ hands. He fought back with a couple really good Tarzan novels. The last of that batch, Tarzan And The Lion Man, ridiculed MGM’s fabled African epic Trader Horn in revenge for MGM’s treatment of Tarzan.
That Burroughs realized he had been frozen out is evident by the scene with which I started this essay where Tarzan is standing outside the walls of London wanting in. This is some of the most masterful writing of a dream sequence imaginable. The room for interpretation is almost unlimited. For this essay I choose to see the scene as representing Burroughs/Tarzan in 1911 when he was standing out in the cold wondering how to be become a success.
Symbolically Tarzan leaps up grasping the down pointed sharpened stakes impossibly lifting himself straight up then rolling forward past the stakes. Burroughs success as a writer was about that impossible and sensational.
Once inside the symbolic London that is populated by a colony of apes who are literal descendants of Henry the Eighth and his court Tarzan skirts the partying crowd to begin a solo attempt to ‘heaven.’ So in real life as Burroughs was shunned by society Tarzan avoids it here. The apes as descendants of Henry the Eighth have been created by a renegade Englishmen known as God to the apes who created them by a process similar to DNA
God’s castle then is known as Heaven and it is that to which Tarzan ascends. As noted earlier he enters a door and is trapped in prison. There is no viable way out so that Heaven is torched going up in flames just as Burroughs career had with the loss of Tarzan. Thus everything Burroughs had worked for for twenty years went up in smoke. This is a very simple interpretation. A more complete one would take fifty or more pages.
Now in control the Judaeo-Communists set about ridding themselves of Burroughs in much the same way, perhaps, that Chicago did.
Burroughs rashly undertook to make his own Tarzan movies. He was led into this disastrous effort by Ashton Dearholt. This man was the husband of Florence Gilbert Dearholt who left Dearholt to marry Burroughs at just this time. Linking up with Dearholt was a recipe for disaster it seems to me.
Burroughs’ venture into film making was disastrous. He had antagonized the radio people so the successful and lucrative Tarzan series were off the air until after his death. His productive years as a writer were behind him so he was almost entirely dependent on MGM for his income. While MGM could have successfully made two or three Tarzan films a year profitably they chose to make a movie only every two or three years keeping Burroughs on a short financial lease.
Unable to sustain a high profile Hollywood life style ERB was forced into exile in 1940 leaving the film capitol for Hawaii.
Thus the process of placing him outside begun in the fifth grade in Chicago was completed in 1940 when he was run out of Los Angeles virtually stripped of his great creation Tarzan.
With their nemesis gone MGM tired of the game giving up the lucrative character a couple years later to Sol Lesser.
Lesser’s Tarzan movies redeemed ERB’s declining years allowing him to return to Los Angeles to quietly live out his life without worries.
I have presented here only as aspect of ERB’s life but in many ways what a life it was. One wonders if ERB was joking when he told a reporter he lived an uneventful life.
The Old Tiger capped his astonishing career in 1950 when he passed to the outside one last time. He passed through an open door that softly closed behind him allowing no return.
Edgar Rice Burroughs As An Outsider
By
R.E. Prindle
…the great cats roamed this strange valley of the gorillas.
=Edgar Rice Burroughs
And the Great White Ape stood before the wall that surrounded London of Africa. Cats, gorillas, walls, doors, London England deep in the Heart of Darkness…he was the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan Of The Apes.
Tarzan is alone as usual as was, one suspects, his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. The year is 1933 both in Burroughs’ imaginary Africa and temporal Los Angeles where the writer plied his trade.
After a lifetime of trying to break into society Burroughs has Tarzan standing outside the wall of London into which he must break like a burglar or thief in the night.
Within the walls is the citadel of ERB’s desires, the great city on the hill, the castle of redemption. Now fifty-eight years old Burroughs had achieved all the material attributes of success only to have the prize dashed from his hands.
Symbolically he enters the castle of his dreams to find instead only a prison. The long climb up the stairway to heaven leads only to jail.
Nineteen thirty-three was the one hundredth anniversary of his father’s birth. The old ghoul who had imprinted him so evilly had come back from the grave to haunt him, to deny him what he had worked so hard to attain.
As in real life where MGM had stripped him of his life’s work in one deft move so now in his imagination his castle was destroyed by a raging fire storm. Symbolically he portrays his relationship with his father as an old coot who had led him around with a halter round his neck. In his great apocalyptic dream ERB reverses the roles and puts the halter about his father’s neck.
Too late ERB realized he had signed away his great creation to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In a desperate attempt to reclaim him ERB formed a movie company in which for a logo he adopted the MGM symbol but replaced the roaring lion, Leo, with an image of Tarzan shouting Tar-man-gan-eeee. ERB failed to detourne the image and MGM added insult to injury by forcing ERB into exile in Hawaii. Now seventy years old our big cat was exactly where he had been in Chicago when he entered manhood- on the other side of the wall. Still outside. It wasn’t supposed to be that way as Burroughs lamented.
How did it come to pass? How could he succeed so magnificently and yet fail so egregiously? How could life treat him so bad. ERB was just born under a bad sign.
His life began propitiously. He was in effect a little prince in his family for his first seven or eight years but then things began to mysteriously unravel and the little prince became a pauper. And that was more or less how ERB explained his life to himself. The three most influential books in his life were Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.
Burroughs apparently understood his life at least until 1930 in terms of these three books. The Prince became a Pauper then a Prince again. Little Lord Fauntleroy, a disinherited prince lived his young life as a pauper realizing his destiny as a prince at last. These two books were published in Burroughs’ childhood. One assumes he first read them as a boy.
The Virginian was published in 1902. Burroughs said that he had read all three books six or seven times by the early twenties. It is impossible to know when he read The Virginian the first time but as his life was in a turmoil during 1902-03 and ‘04 I wouldn’t think that his first reading was before ‘05 but one can’t be certain.
It would appear that ERB modeled his adult life on Lin McLean, the Virginian.
McLean was essentially a loner who went West to Wyoming much as ERB had repeatedly gone to Idaho. Wister tells the story of the famous Johnson County War through the eyes of his hero, McLean. ERB was in Idaho when the Johnson County War was in progress so Burroughs would have understood the novel with an intimacy denied the rest of us. McLean was a Tarzanic figure who wooed and won a school marm who was culturally far above him. This was perhaps not unlike ERB and Emma. Emma always referred to ERB as a lowbrow.
The most memorable episode in The Virginian is McLean’s marriage. He and his bride honeymoon in the wilds, in romantic scenery quite reminiscent of Burroughs’ dream Africa. Perhaps his taking Emma to Idaho in 1903 was an attempt to recreate this romantic honeymoon. A basis of Tarzan then can be found in Lin McLean the silent Virginian. Also ERB’s apparent vision of himself.
As Burroughs complained that ‘it wasn’t supposed to be like this’ his condition changed began to go wrong about the fifth grade. Here his father began his role as the monstrous ‘God’ of Tarzan And The Lion Man. ERB had attended Brown School up to this point. At this age his father moved him from Brown and sent the young boy to, of all places, a girl’s school. One can only imagine the young boy’s anguish at attending a girl’s school. ERB’s connections with his early schoolmates was disrupted. He had barely begun his tenure at the girl’s school when his father transferred him to a Latin school named Harvard for two and a half years. There is no indication ERB formed any abiding friendships at Harvard School.
While the kids in his neighborhood were walking to Brown everyday ERB was riding his pony alone to Harvard. Undoubtedly the students of Harvard were drawn from all over Chicago so that apart from seeing his fellows in class ERB had little else to do with them.
His father then pulled him from Harvard School sending him off to his brothers’ ranch in Idaho. At this point then he had no contact with his fellow Chicagoans while he was thrown into a delightful situation but one in which he associated with rough cowboys with little education while he attended no school himself.
Why his father was doing this is open to interpretation. Certainly he must have known what the effects would be on his son. His father’s next move was to transfer young ERB to the snobbery of the East at Phillips Academy where he essentially flunked out within a year.
One can only imagine the turmoil in the young man’s mind as he returned to a Chicago he no longer knew and more importantly where no one knew him. It doesn’t seem possible that he could have any but a few acquaintances in Chicago to whom he would still have been a near stranger. So already at sixteen young Burroughs had been placed beyond the pale of society. He was already an outsider. The most he could hope for was to be allowed to return to Brown to finish high school. There at least he had a viable connection with Emma however he would be a rough cut diamond lacking the polish and sophistication that would have appealed to Emma’s father.
Such an opportunity was not to be. At this point ERB’s father placed him in the Michigan Military Academy. ERB described the Academy as a place where parents warehoused their young juvenile delinquents. The resentment is clear in ERB’s attitude. Indeed he rebelled at this latest insult from his, by this time, inscrutable father.
The boy ran away from the MMA returning to his father’s house in Chicago. One wonders if he hopped freights to get there. One can only imagine the anguished pleading of Burroughs as he begged, perhaps on his knees, to be allowed to stay home and attend Brown. His old martinet of a father would have none of it. He packed the boy off again to the Military Academy.
Military Academy! How distasteful the very sound is. To be packed off again to a place where you knew no one and they as ERB believed, were juvenile delinquents. One can only imagine how crushed the boy’s spirit was. He became a class clown. What his fate might have been if his Commandant hadn’t been one who commanded his respect by the name of Charles King one can only guess. King who was not as well remembered by his classmates as he was by Burroughs nevertheless he bucked the boy up perhaps saving his life. At any rate Burroughs developed a dual personality as a class clown while at the same time being responsible enough to lead the football team to undreamed of heights while becoming an outstanding horseman and trick rider.
It was at the MMA that Burroughs formed the only long term friendship of which we are aware; this was a young man from Beatrice, Nebraska by the name of Herb Weston. Weston’s correspondence with Burroughs over the next forty years or so has been preserved for us by Matt Cohen in his book Brother Men.
Burroughs knew Weston only from September to May of the year before he left to join the Army. They saw each other but seldom after that apparently neither corresponding or meeting from 1896 to 1905 or so, but still the friendship flourished in later years.
In 1896 ERB joined the Army requesting the worst post they had and that was willingly given to him. So at this point ERB severed whatever and all ties that he had with anybody. He was the quintessential outsider. He was flying solo.
He apparently took a train to the end of the line wherever that may have been taking a stage coach into his post, Fort Grant, Arizona.
Whatever his fantasy of the Army was he was immediately disabused. He and four other fellows formed an informal club romantically named The Might Have Seen Better Days Club. There’s an element of self pity in the name. It deserves further comment.
The name implies a certain amount of depression. That is implied in Burroughs’ asking for the worst post in the Army. Only one fairly deeply depressed would ask for such a post. It’s the same as the fit of depression in which men used to join the French Foreign Legion.
Burroughs says he joined the Army with the intent of working his way up through the ranks to become an officer. I’m sure it didn’t take long to disabuse himself of that notion. Thus he began to petition his father to get him out of his commitment. His father had enough pull to do so.
So in 1897 he was back on the outside without a plan, presumably just as depressed. At that point in his life he was free to go anywhere, California, New York, the Bay Area, within a year the Yukon Gold Rush would be on. Heck he might even have traveled North with his future hero, Jack London. But ERB took his depression back home to Chicago.
Chicago was his home town but he knew no one there except Emma. ERB went to work for his father. Probably difficult enough but more importantly the office was located on Madison Avenue. That street was the main stem of Chicago’s huge hobo population. These were really outsiders, the men who didn’t fit in to use Robert Service’s memorable phrase.
ERB saw them everyday and must have spoken to many of them, had conversations so that he probably recognized some affinity with them. Hobos would certainly figure large in his writing from time to time.
He undoubtedly fantasized embracing the life of the road and may have on an experimental basis. He was to form a relationship with one of the foremost Hobo poets, H.H. Knibbs later in life. So the pull of the road was there.
He still had no idea what to do with his life. He had joined the Army without telling anyone including his future wife Emma Hulbert. She had sent a letter to him at Fort Grant in September of 1896. When he returned he discovered that he may have been away too long. As improbable as it may sound she was then being courted by a millionaire’s son, Frank Martin. As ERB had no real wish to be married he probably should have let Martin marry Emma.
It seems quite obvious Emma preferred the impoverished ERB to the wealth of Martin. These things obviously do happen. In the denouement thirty-five years later it would have been better for Emma if she had gone with Martin..
At this time ERB chose to return to Idaho. That didn’t work out well so he bounced back to Chicago. Now comes a very critical moment in his life. Perhaps Martin had been on the verge of success with Emma who may have been hurt and confused at the latest abandonment by the man she truly, truly loved.
When Burroughs returned heartening Emma once again Martin very obviously became exasperated at what he considered a bad penny who kept turning up at disadvantageous times.. It appears that he decided to settle ERB’s hash. Martin’s father was a railroad magnate possessing his own private rail car. Martin invited this nemesis of his to take a round trip to New York City with the return trip through Canada and Toronto.
It would appear that he set up a murder attempt to remove his rival in Toronto. On a night on the town in Toronto ERB was either lured into a fight with a couple thugs or accosted by them. The thug delivered a vicious blow to ERB’s forehead with a sap or leaded pipe that ripped his scalp open and laid ERB low.
While the injury was not obvious ERB was seriously hurt. Apparently internal bleeding formed a clot between his forebrain and skull hat had a profound effect on his personality as well as giving him excruciating headaches half the day for every day of his life at least through 1913-14.
Judging from his writing the pressure caused memory lapses during which he was unable to recall people he was familiar with. As this trait would not have been understood ERB was misinterpreted and become even more of an outsider. After his injury in Toronto ERB married Emma probably to spite Martin as he later said he regretted getting married. Nevertheless he now had a wife along with what must have seemed a very peculiar personality.
It is difficult to imagine what options ERB had open to him now that he had to abandon his rough and rowdy ways to take care of his young wife. Working for his father must have been a difficult experiences as it most often is for a son. In addition to that problem ERB came down with typhoid fever. The convalescence completely disrupted his finances. Now having excruciating headaches, a mind that just came and went and no money, no prospects, no future and little hope the man must have been plunged into the depths of despair.
Perhaps in all those Tarzan stories when Tarzan loses his memory they may reflect ERB’s actual experience at this time being periodically bereft of his memory for more or less short periods of time.
Obviously not thinking very clearly he decided to return to Idaho with his new wife and absolutely no prospects of making a living. Well, it worked for the Virginian.
Now, the Yukon Gold Rush had occurred in 1898. Out of that gold rush came a young writer by the name of Jack London. Burroughs was an inveterate reader in those days before movies, TV and radio so that his imagination was fired by London’s stories. London had also been a hobo as a boy.
On the way out to Idaho ERB had Emma riding in an open boxcar so as to comfort their dog. So in his strange way ERB was actually hoboing and doing it with his wife.
Two years later they returned once again to Chicago. Already an outsider ERB now embarked on a career that pushed him further out. Already declassed by his father’s treatment he now declassed himself further by taking an odd assortment of jobs. This period has not been inadequately covered in existing biographies. Perhaps the job that pushed him beyond the pale of social acceptability was his association with a patent medicine man by the name of Stace. Patent medicines were among the most disreputable vocations a man could have. ‘Snake oil’ pitchmen have been parodied in so many movies one has visions of their being run out of town one step ahead of the sheriff.
Burroughs association with Stace occurred just after the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and an expose of the business by Samuel Hopkins Adams. A most unpropitious time to be in the patent medicine business. Stace was run out of business by the authorities. It was probably at this time that Burroughs picked up his experiences with grand juries and the police that he displays in The Girl From Farriss’s
Rather than dissociate himself from Stace as he should have done ERB joined with him in a successor venture named Burroughs-Stace. This could not have helped his reputation but would have implicated him as a principal in the snake oil outfit. One can only believe that it wasn’t very desirable to know Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Thus as his mind began to jell around the fiction that would make him famous his prospects were getting slim and slimmer. Perhaps he was grooming himself for the solitary profession of writer.
His experiences and reading all came together in 1911 when he wrote and sold his first effort, A Princess Of Mars. Unusually for a new writer he had more than one good story in him so that within two years he had achieved literary success being able to quit his day job to take up writing full time.
2.
By this time ERB had been outside the loop for so long, from the fifth grade on that his behavior was gauche. He didn’t know how to behave or discourse in polite society. So at this point it didn’t matter how much money he made or how famous he became he was truly a man who couldn’t fit in. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his writing.
One is astonished that between 1912 and 1918, a mere six years, Tarzan became a household word. It was that by the time the first movie was released there was virtually no one in America who hadn’t heard the name Tarzan. This is a level of success rarely attained.
And yet one is mystified as to how this came about. Certainly the penetration wasn’t achieved by a pulp magazine like All Story. The fiction magazines while popular had limited distribution. If we are to believe the sales figures Tarzan Of The Apes had substantial success but nothing like the novels of Zane Grey for instance.
His publisher, McClurg’s made no effort to capitalize on the phenomenon. Their hard cover first issue was very limited in numbers going into reprint status almost immediately. At the end of the decade ERB was reduced to urging them to print at least 40,000 copies before they turned a book over for republication. McClurg’s was loath to do so and I have seen no evidence they did. So one has the phenomenon of Tarzan being a household word with no clear evidence of how it came to be.
Today such success would make an author a celebrity yet the evidence is Burroughs was scorned in his own home town of Chicago. The city had a vibrant publishing scene in those days. There were plenty of famous authors in town with clubs and gathering places yet Burroughs apparently was welcome in none of them.
It is true that he was a pulp writer which was the lowest rung on the literary ladder. It is possibly true that he was the first truly imaginative writer in the sense of today’s sci fi, horror and fantasy genres. One may argue that Wells was first and while his stories are highly imaginative they are still extensions of reality.
Burroughs severed the connection with reality; he deals in impossibilities as if they were possible. One can’t stretch reality far enough to possibly cover Mars, Tarzan’s Africa and Pellucidar. They are clearly impossible. The Land That Time Forgot? Get out of here. So, as an originator of something new, a term I hate to use, Burroughs was a pioneer way out in front of the van. Hence he would have been incomprehensible to the average mind. In the language of the fifties he would have been a phenom. Weird, strange and that’s the way he seemed to have been treated.
In today’s terms his personality would have been vulnerable. Already an outsider the doors were politely shut in his face. Indeed, if one reads his stories they are full of closed doors that won’t open or can’t be opened. In Tarzan And The Lion Man, and this is a great scene, one of an array of doors is standing ajar while all the others are shut tight. The one open door is a trap that puts Tarzan in prison.
So we may assume that all doors were closed to him in Chicago. Whether his reputation followed him or his subject matter put people off or a combination of the two ERB was firmly kept outside. Chicago had that unwanted sign upon its heart.
There was one club that was open to Burroughs. That club was a catch all called The White Paper Club that was open to anyone who made marks on white paper. I suppose that could include anyone who intended to write that novel but had yet to put pen to paper.
Thus the man who had created a household word was forced to mingle with anyone who had soiled a piece of paper. Is it any wonder that ERB wanted to move.
Porges records ERB’s farewell dinner as though it were some sort of complimentary send off but Mr. Prindle dissents.
Among a number of unusual things ERB did that I don’t want to go into here was to circulate the story that he was going West to raise prize hogs. Now, Carl Sandburg called Chicago the Hog Butcher to the World. So one wonders what ERB was thinking. He actually did raise hogs at Tarzana but pig farming darn near broke him.
I can only guess what his fellow White Paperers thought but drawn on the menu was a picture of a pig with wings flying West. If I were ERB I might laugh with the fellows but I wouldn’t think it was a very funny joke. After all the phrase ‘when pigs have wings’ means something impossible while if I were ERB I might think that pig meant me and I might think the message was ‘good riddance and keep going.’ But, maybe I’m hypersensitive.
At any rate Burroughs went and he didn’t come back. He never seemed to miss Chicago a lot although there are many references to the city in his later work so he kept a watchful eye on the town.
So, at the age of forty-three ERB began a new life in sunny SoCal. The world had changed: without possibly understanding why there was no place in the new world for people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Part of his problem was caused by himself. As a newcomer in town ERB took it upon himself to be morally outraged by Hollywood. Hollywood had itself outraged the morals of the nation so the town was tender and sensitive on the subject. By the time ERB published his book in 1923 Hollywood was mired in some serious scandals not least of which was the Fatty Arbuckle murder trials. ERB’s novel discussing the seedier side of Hollywood life offended some sensibilities. As a newcomer to Hollywood the novel, The Girl From Hollywood, was ill considered. While an excellent novel, in the circumstances it had been better left unwritten.
In combination with his novel the political situation of the world had changed. The World Revolution had succeeded in Russia in 1917. Everyone not in sympathy was anathema and ERB was not in sympathy. He was not loath to advertise this fact. Hence the Communists reacted: in the years 1920-24 his novels were neglected in Britain; they were under assault in Germany; his movie revenues dried up in Hollywood while one wonders if his books received the circulation their popularity demanded.
Another social issue forcing him to the outside was his response to a questionnaire forwarded to him from Chicago sent by the American Jewish Committee. The questionnaire apparently wanted to know his opinions on Jews- was he unequivocally a supporter or did he have reservations. ERB had a reservation that was reasonable but not reasonable enough for the American Jewish Committee. ERB was apparently black listed as all income from the movies ceased from 1921 to 1928. Tarzan was persona non gratis in Hollywood.
When his income dried up ERB was no longer able to support his magnificent estate of Tarzana. Thus began years of economic problems. Hollywood does not tolerate economic problems so there is no record of ERB having a social history in Tinseltown.
ERB began having problems with his publishers most likely because of his anti-Red politics. This resulted in his forming his own publishing company in 1930. So, really by 1930 ERB was virtually outside society. Like his creation Tarzan he was backing down a limb followed by a panther. Undoubtedly it was thought that he would fail as a publisher but he didn’t.
His movie fortunes had changed in 1928 when the ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, Jack Kennedy’s father, broke the black list and released a Tarzan movie.
This caused a reaction in the Jewish community that apparently sought to undermine the FBO film Tarzan And The Golden Lion that is available today and a very good silent film starring ERB’s son-in-law, James Pierce who draws a mean bow on the cover.
Two quick films were released by a Jewish film company that held the rights to two novels purchased in 1922 but never filmed. One of these is currently available Tarzan The Tiger while the other isn’t. Frank Merrill of Tarzan The Tiger isn’t a bad Tarzan either.
Apparently heads were put together for a long term solution to Burroughs. A plan was put in effect by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM. In 1931 ERB signed a contract with them that virtually stripped him of control of his creation. Although MGM’s 1932 Tarzan Of The Apes was a hit there is good reason to believe it was a clownish attempt to finish the career of Tarzan. No one was more surprised than MGM when the movie became a box office smash. This was the first sound movie and maybe the famous Tarzan yell, that also might have been meant as a joke, put the movie over. But the career of Tarzan was effectively out of Burroughs’ hands. He fought back with a couple really good Tarzan novels. The last of that batch, Tarzan And The Lion Man, ridiculed MGM’s fabled African epic Trader Horn in revenge for MGM’s treatment of Tarzan.
That Burroughs realized he had been frozen out is evident by the scene with which I started this essay where Tarzan is standing outside the walls of London wanting in. This is some of the most masterful writing of a dream sequence imaginable. The room for interpretation is almost unlimited. For this essay I choose to see the scene as representing Burroughs/Tarzan in 1911 when he was standing out in the cold wondering how to be become a success.
Symbolically Tarzan leaps up grasping the down pointed sharpened stakes impossibly lifting himself straight up then rolling forward past the stakes. Burroughs success as a writer was about that impossible and sensational.
Once inside the symbolic London that is populated by a colony of apes who are literal descendants of Henry the Eighth and his court Tarzan skirts the partying crowd to begin a solo attempt to ‘heaven.’ So in real life as Burroughs was shunned by society Tarzan avoids it here. The apes as descendants of Henry the Eighth have been created by a renegade Englishmen known as God to the apes who created them by a process similar to DNA
God’s castle then is known as Heaven and it is that to which Tarzan ascends. As noted earlier he enters a door and is trapped in prison. There is no viable way out so that Heaven is torched going up in flames just as Burroughs career had with the loss of Tarzan. Thus everything Burroughs had worked for for twenty years went up in smoke. This is a very simple interpretation. A more complete one would take fifty or more pages.
Now in control the Judaeo-Communists set about ridding themselves of Burroughs in much the same way, perhaps, that Chicago did.
Burroughs rashly undertook to make his own Tarzan movies. He was led into this disastrous effort by Ashton Dearholt. This man was the husband of Florence Gilbert Dearholt who left Dearholt to marry Burroughs at just this time. Linking up with Dearholt was a recipe for disaster it seems to me.
Burroughs’ venture into film making was disastrous. He had antagonized the radio people so the successful and lucrative Tarzan series were off the air until after his death. His productive years as a writer were behind him so he was almost entirely dependent on MGM for his income. While MGM could have successfully made two or three Tarzan films a year profitably they chose to make a movie only every two or three years keeping Burroughs on a short financial lease.
Unable to sustain a high profile Hollywood life style ERB was forced into exile in 1940 leaving the film capitol for Hawaii.
Thus the process of placing him outside begun in the fifth grade in Chicago was completed in 1940 when he was run out of Los Angeles virtually stripped of his great creation Tarzan.
With their nemesis gone MGM tired of the game giving up the lucrative character a couple years later to Sol Lesser.
Lesser’s Tarzan movies redeemed ERB’s declining years allowing him to return to Los Angeles to quietly live out his life without worries.
I have presented here only as aspect of ERB’s life but in many ways what a life it was. One wonders if ERB was joking when he told a reporter he lived an uneventful life.
The Old Tiger capped his astonishing career in 1950 when he passed to the outside one last time. He passed through an open door that softly closed behind him allowing no return.
Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Early Married Years
November 18, 2007
Edgar Rice Burroughs:
The Early Married Years
by
R.E. Prindle
First published in Burroughs Bulletin
#60 Fall 2004
Why am I stumbling down the highway
When I should be rolling ‘cross the skyway?
– Donovan
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
-Edgar Rice Burroughs
1.
The marriage to Emma on January 31, 1900 was the definite turning point in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ life. He wasn’t ready for marriage and he didn’t want it. Up to this point his life had had no direction; it was leading nowhere, the guy was just drifting. ERB had no clear cut goals and if had had one he had no plan in place to attain it.
Beyond a vague interest in art and literature he had no career ideas. Judging from the evidence between his brief and unsatisfactory stint at the Chicago Art Institue at which he refused to subject himself to discipline and the commencement of his literary career, his mind was always tending or drifting to some such end. However at the beginning of 1900, with a new wife and the attendant responsibilites he had to find some way to end his rough and rowdy ways and succeed in business, to make his pile before he was thirty.
Striking it rich before he was thirty was important to him. That desire may have influenced him to head West in 1903 to join his brothers in their gold dredging business. Perhaps he thought he might get in on a major find. Finding a pile of gold or precious stones would be a dominating theme in his Tarzan novels. Tarzan was an extension of his primary personality facet.
But now, as his own life entered the second phase, the country was entering the second of the three distinct phases it would embrace during Burroughs’ lifetime. The first phase we have already covered in depicting Burroughs’ first twenty-five years. The transition from Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and the Wild Frontier to modern industrial America was completed in such a bewilderingly rapid manner that one wonders that anyone kept his sanity. The world you lived in today was literally gone tomorrow.
The life of George T. Burroughs spanned this transition from conestoga wagons to the Model T. From the invention of the telegraph and Morse Code to the long distance telephone lines with a phone in the living room. From Virgin forests and unbroken sod to cutover wastelands and McCormickReapers cutting over immense fields of golden wheat.
The world of Fennimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo in the The Prairie had disappeared almost before it was seen. there was barely time to write about it. Right behind Bumppo the skyscrapers of Chicago were thrust into the air while the conflict between the White City and the Black City erupted into industrial warfare. Out of the smoke and flames of burning railway carriages the twentieth century was born.
The streamlined Twentieth Century Limited took the place of purpose built looking locomotives. the might ten-wheel drive ushered in the new era. My god, it takes your breath away just to think about it! What had happened almost wasn’t even a beginning it was just a foretaste of things to come.
One wonders how it affected Edgar Rice Burroughs. Perhaps it was happening too fast to register on the conscious mind. I don’t know if anyone alive has ingested and digested the changes since the great convulsion of 1789. God knows I have tried and failed miserably, as this pitiful effort shows, yet I do honestly believe that I have succeeded better than a very few.
Perhaps in his way Edgar Rice Burroughs made the attempt with his Martian chronicles representing science and the future, with the Tarzan novels dealing with his contemporary life, while the Pellucidar series may possible have represented the unspoiled vistas of primordial Cooperesque America. It’s not an unattractive notion, but I don’t know how true it might be.
By 1900 America was ‘won’. Won and lost. Many plunged fearlessly into the furture while others dragged their feet trying to reclaim that which, while it could still be seen, was no longer there. The Vanished Frontier had a profound effect on American life. It spawned a whole new class of men or at least defined their manifestation. They were men and a way of life which had a profound effect on the mind of Burroughs. While he would never join them, he fantasized the life and if one looks closely wrote a great deal about them. These men were the hoboes, tramps and bums, the inveterate roamers who made Chicago the main stem of their transient empire.
In Chicago their main stem or gathering place was on Madison Avenue, the street on which the battery factory was located. Young Burroughs must have marveled at the phenomenon every spring as the hoboes cleared out of Chicago to spread over the mid-west to help in the sowing and harvesting of the great crops of grain. Every fall they poured out of the boxcars to return to winter in the Windy City.
All they needed was a stake of thirty dollars to get them through the whole winter. Thirty dollars for six months! That’s all it took in those days. When one hears ERB plead poverty when he was earning two thousand or more a year one wonders whether his claims were real or only answered a psychological need.
Nor were these mere down-and-out men as they are pictured in the imagination. As Robert Service was to picture them, these were ‘The Men Who Don’t Fit In’; men who made an ideology of their roaming which was given political form and organization beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century. As Burroughs identified with hoboes as an aspect of his Animus or personality given him by his encounter with John the Bully, I would like to take some space to describe the Hobo phenomenon.
Hoboes are perhaps the most amazing and unique of historical phenomena. They were born of the railroad and are inseparable from it. As we all know, the Golden Spike uniting the East and West coasts was driven on Promontory Point in Utah immediately after the end of the Civil War. The line was audaciously laid through unconquered Indian territory and buffalo wallows. We all remember movie scenes of Indians attacking the Iron Horse with bows and arrows and ‘hunters’ shooting buffalo from train cars dragged behind locomotives belching smoke and flames.
Before the Civil War trains were an innovation in world history arriving in America only in the mid-1830s. After the War Between The States, rail lines proliferated with amazing speed so that by the time of ERB and Emma’s wedding there were literally hundreds of thousands of miles of rail lines crisscrossing the country from North to South and East to West. Passenger trains which are not particularly well suited for hoboing formed a very small percentage of trains, while freight trains formed the bulk of the cars. Box cars were deadheaded or shuttled back and forth empty, no freight. These were the preferred hobo mode of conveyance; they were dry, out of the weather and comparatively warm and comfortable.
Like any other war, the Civil War produced a legion or two of men whose nerves had been so disorganized by the excitement of war that they found it difficult to reintegrate themselves into society. Many of them took to working on the railroads, building the lines here and there. Tansportation was provided by boxcar so, I suppose, they got used to riding in boxcars.
As the lines spread and proliferated, it became possible to just hop a train and ride. As the hobo songwriter Jimmie Rodgers put it:
When a woman gets the blues
She hangs her little head and cries;
When a woman gets the blues
She hangs her little head and cries;
When a man get the blues
He hops a train and rides.
Before the Civil War that wasn’t possible.
Thus, as time passed and the first generation of hoboes left the road, anyone who was restless, adventurous, didn’t want to work or just didn’t fit in could take to a life of roaming. The roaming life was a romantic ideal that had its charms.
Not unsurprisingly a body of literature developed espousing the ideals that motivated hoboing. These took the forms of songs and poems, all narratives are suspect, the Hobo mind falling to rhyme. Large amounts of the literature are anonymous probably growing to fruition around campfires in the hobo jungles as their gathering sites were known. Hence the line from the song ‘Wabash Cannoball’: You’re riding through the jungles on the Wabash Cannonball.
However there were also poets who composed for their audience. The Wobbly Joe Hill wrote one of the most famous songs: ‘Hallelujah, I’m A Bum.’ Perhaps the currently most famous of the Hobo poets is Woody Guthrie. His Grand Coulee Dam and Roll On Columbia are noteworthy songs for any genre. One of his songs which has become an anthem for the disaffected only makes real sense when it is placed in the context of hobo ideology. That was:
This land is your land,
This land is my land,
From California,
To the New York Island.
Guthrie means that this land is the true possession of the wandering hobo and not businessmen or straights like you and me.
For a thumbnail sketch of the Hobo of Burroughs’ time and his ideals, let’s read a song which has retained some currency down to this day. There are apparently innumerable verses and variations on verses that were concocted around the jungle fires but his is the recension printed in The Oxford Book of American Verse (Oxford University Press, 1927) It’s probably cleaned up a little for academic tastes but it still has a nice breezy quality.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
Introduction
On a summer day in the month of May,
A burly little bum come a hikin’,
He was travelin’ down that lonesome road.
A lookin’ for his likin’.
He was headed for a land that’s far away,
Beside those crystal fountains,
I’ll see you all, this comin’ fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
1.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks,
And the little streams of alkyhol
Come a tricklin’ down the rocks.
Where the shacks all have to tip their hats,
And the railroad bulls are blind.
There’s a lake of stew, and whiskey too,
And you can paddle all around ’em
In your big canoe,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Chorus: O…the buzzin’ of the bees
In the cigarette trees,
Round the soda water fountains,
Next to the lemonade springs,
Where the wangdoodle sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
2.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There’s a land that fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes,
And you sleep out every night,
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day,
O I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow,
Where the rain don’t fall and the wind don’t blow,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
(Chorus)
3.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
The jails are made of tin,
And you can bust right out again
As soon as you get in.
The farmers trees are full of fruit,
The barns are full of hay,
I’m going to stay where you sleep all day,
Where they boiled in oil the inventory of toil,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains. (Chorus)
Now there’s a utopia in a parallel universe worthy of the pen of H.G. Wells.
The poem does not refer to the dreams of a defeated man but rather a defiant one, one who has rejected the motivations of the ordinary man who does work for a living. This man is going to pluck the labor of other men for his own benefit- the farmers trees are full of fruit- while using another’s toil for his own benefit- the barns are full of hay. the Hobo is going to a place where they ‘boiled in oil the man who invented toil.’ The Hobo won’t work.
In another poem he says: ‘I could be a banker if I wanted to be. But the thought of an iron cage is too suggestive to me. Now, I could be a broker without the slightest excuse. But look at 1929 and tell me what’s the use.’
As can be seen, the Hobo equates himself with the executive class but to reach his true position in society he would have to apply himself or ‘toil’ against which alternative he adamantly sets his face.
He would rather lament a fate that has inexplicably denied him his birthright, his true place in society.
As another of the great hobo songwriters, Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933) put it in his ‘Hobo’s Meditation’.
Tonight as I lay on the boxcar
Just waiting for a train to pass by,
What will become of the hobo
When their time comes to die.
Has the Master up there in heaven
Got a place we might call a home
Will we have to work for a living
Or can we continue to roam?
Will there be any freight trains in heaven
Any boxcars in which we might hide
Will there be any tough cops or brakemen
Will they tell us that we cannot ride?
Will the hobo chum with the rich man
Will he always have money to spare
Will they have respect for a hobo
In the land that is hidden up there?
The ‘land that is hidden up there’ is the same as the Big Rock Candy Mountain where the rich man will admit the hobo to equality and respect, by which the hobo means supremacy. For make no mistake, the hobo as H.H. Knibbs indicates has the true vision of life:
We are the true nobility!
Sons of rest and the outdoor air!
Knights of the tie and rail are we,
Lightly wandering everywhere.
Having no gold we have no care,
As over the crust of world we go,
Stepping in time to this ditty rare:
Take up your bundle and beat it, ‘Bo.
That’s almost a political agenda to match the ideology. Knibbs say in his ‘The Grand Old Privilege.:
Folks say we got no morals- that they all fell in the soup,
And no conscience- so the would-be goodies say.
And perhaps our good intentions did just up and flew the coop,
While we stood around and watched them fade away.
But there’s one thing that we’re loving more than money, grub or booze,
Or even the decent folks that speaks us fair,
And that’s the grand old privilege and chuck our luck and choose
Any road at any time anywhere.
Well, that’s a fine impatience with any state of affairs.
So it’s best ‘Bo, while your feet are mates;
Take a look at the whole United States.
Oh the fire and a pal and a smoke at night,
And up again in the morning bright,
With nothing but road and sky in sight!
And nothing to do but go.
I love the sound of it myself, but if you look behind the glitter of Knibbs you’ll see a man with alternatives talking. Knibbs is kind of your Fifth Avenue penthouse hobo talking. Henry Herbert Knibbs (1874-1945), who had such a profound effect on Edgar Rice Burroughs, was a year older while dying a few years earlier.
He came from a well-to-do family where he developed a feeling of romance for cowboys and bums back East, although he never really belonged to either. He may even have chosen the road for a couple years experience, for something to write about, as he intended to write being an English major in college. He certainly became prosperous enough writing for the slicks like The Saturday Evening Post, The American and even breaking into H.L. Mencken’s Smart Set, none of which his chum Edgar Rice Burroughs could ever break into.
Yes, so it’s up ‘Bo for a trip from Barstow to old Berdoo and back to LA for a hot bath and bottle of scotch. That’s my kind of life on the road.
Ta, ta, I’m getting away from myself.
Knibbs and Rodgers and Guthrie actually came after the peak of the phenomenon which was ending by 1903 when the ‘Boes and Tramps and Bums were organizing into their supreme effort to create the Big Rock Candy Mountain right here on earth; when they made their supreme attempt to snatch supremacy from those snooty executives who wouldn’t chum with them; yes, damn them, we’ll combine in the I.W.W. and then we’ll see.
For, don’t you see, the West is dead.
What path is left for you to tread
When hunger wolves are slinking near
Do you not know the West is dead?
The ‘blanket stiff’ now packs his bed
Along the trail of yesteryear
What path is left for you to tread?
Your fathers gold sunsets led
To virgin prairies wide and clear
Do you not know the West is dead?
Now dismal cities rise instead
And freedom is not there nor here
What path is left for you to tread?
Your father’s world, for which they bled,
Is fenced and settled far and near
Do you not know the West is dead?
Your fathers gained a crust of bread
Their bones bleach on the lost frontier,
What path is left for you to tread
Do you not know the West is dead?
Anon. As quoted by Ralph Chaplin (1887-1961) in his autobiography , Wobbly: The Rough And Tumble Story Of An American Radical (University of Chicago Press, 1948)
So that was the problem the bindle stiffs faced, it was work or die, no place to move on to, and which they began to attempt to resolve. Burroughs was stuck in the middle, he couldn’t become a bum which he romantically would have liked nor could he realistically aspire to a seat on the board. Nature’s gold was all taken so he could only aspire to the gold in his mind.
While he might have yearned to be the hobo Bridge of his ‘Out There Somewhere; when he married, he had to abandon that hope, although nearly twenty years later he wrote ‘Tarzan The Untamed’ which can be read as ‘Burroughs the Untamed’. He still yearned after his rough and rowdy ways.
The End.
Addendum To Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
November 16, 2007
Addendum To Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
An Analysis Of Chap. I, Tarzan The Untamed
By
R.E. Prindle
I hope I will be excused for submitting an analysis of only the first Chapter of Tarzan The Untamed. It seems to be very significant while justice couldn’t be done to its remarkable content within a full book review.
Tarzan The Untamed is unusual in that it took ERB a little over a year to write. A very long time for him. The book is also one of the longest Tarzan volumes.
The book was begun three months before Armistice Day on November 11, 1918. This was a tremendously busy period for Burroughs as in January of 1919 he severed his lifelong ties with Chicago forever, moving to Los Angeles. The evidence of the first chapter undoubtedly written by him in August of ‘18 is that this was an especially traumatic period of life for him.
He said he walked out on Emma several times during their marriage. The external evidence of Tarzan The Untamed, Tarzan The Terrible and Tarzan And The Golden Lion is that this period was one of them. At the very least this was a very stormy period for him in his marriage.
The Chapter in question can be divided into three episodes: The killing of Jane and Tarzans discovery of the deed, his reversion to a ‘great white ape’, and the confrontation with the panther. As David Adams has pointed out, whenever a leopard or panther is involved Burroughs is dealing with his sexual problems.
Writing in 1918-19 Burroughs antedates the story to the Fall of 1914 just after the Great War began. He seems to have been particularly aroused by the War. Much to the amazement of his publisher he wanted to become a war correspondent. He was unable to find a place. His writing during this period is replete with references to the War.
It seems possible to relate the death of Jane in the Fall of 1914 to Emma and the Mad King which was written between 9/26 and 11/2 in the Fall of 1914 when the Great War was in progress as reflected in ERB’s story. In the earlier story, ‘Barney Custer of Beatrice’, Barney had performed great services for the Princess Emma, done everything he could do to win her love and trust but she remained distant and distrustful. As the Princess Emma’s attitude refects that of Emma Burroughs this refusal to trust him must have infuriated ERB who at the time must have felt that he done everything a woman could expect of a man. He, in the character of Waldo in 1913’s Cave Girl Part I, actually tells Nadara, who had the same attitude as Princess Emma, that.
ERB’s and Emma’s relationship must have been strained over the intervening four years perhaps reaching a crisis at this time as ERB appears to have walked out at some time in this period although with the turmoil of moving and resettling it is difficult to tell when.
At any rate the brutal murder of Jane burned beyond all recognition except significantly her jewelry indicates the depth of ERB’s emotions. The jewelry may be especially significant in that ERB lamented that in his impoverished days he had to pawn Emma’s jewelry. That time or those times may have been especially bitter for him.
While it is true that he was persuaded to change the story bringing Jane back to life there seems little possibility for the reader to believe anything but that Jane was actually killed. The implication then is that Emma was dead to ERB. He had always regretted marrying Emma, or marrying at all, even going to the extent of saying that Tarzan should never have married which is to say himself. One wonders why, if he felt so strongly he didn’t seek a divorce at this time.
That is how ERB resolves that sexual problem of his wife. ERB then inserts a long paragraph explaining that now that Jane is dead Tarzan reverts to his original identity of the ‘great White ape’ or pure beast. It is explained that he never felt comfortable in his thin veneer of civilization. He assumed it merely because it pleased Jane and now that she is dead he no longer has any use for the guise. Hence as he stalks through the jungle in pursuit of the Germans he does so as a stalking beast no different than a lion or tiger. But more intelligent. He may revert to the beast but he doesn’t abandon the intellectual trappings of the veneer of civilization. Still got Daddy’s knife at his side.
Then in the last third of the chapter having resolved his heterosexual problem he turns to another serious aspect of his sexuality, that of his feeling of emasculation. That aroused homosexual feelings in him that he stoutly rejected.
ERB gave voice to this part of his psychology in Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid, or otherwise, The Oakdale Affair of 1917, the previous year. Whether there are indications of homosexual feeling between Bridge and Billy Byrne in ‘Out There Somewhere’ is not clear to me at this time. I would have to read it again with that object in mind but they are probably there. As there are abundant indications of the sexual malaise in his subsequent writings it would seem clear that having solved one sexual problem by having others kill it he then turned to the emasculation problem that he had to deal with by himself alone, killing it.
In all other instances where the leopard or panther symbol appears women are involved except in one instance involving the male ape, Akut, in Beasts of Tarzan. There are definite homosexual overtones in that episode. As Tarzan confronts the male panther in this instance alone the beast must refer to Burroughs own sexual ambivalence. Especially as in this instance ERB combines the Panther motif with the terrific storm and extreme darkness.
The theme of storm and leopard is most dramatically portrayed in Tarzan And The Leopard Men of 1931 that opens with leopard men slashing victims, is followed by a terrific storm and succeeds to the confrontation between Old Timer/ERB and Kali Bwana/Florence.
Tarzan the Invincible of 1930 has the terrific storm as Tarzan and La come close to sexual consummation.
So, in this story almost separate from the rest of the novel, the story opens with the brutal murder of Jane followed by Tarzan’s confrontation with Sheeta in the terrific storm.
In this story we learn that Tarzan has some favorite trees. I can’t think of another instance in the oeuvre where Tarzan returns to a tree. In every other instance he merely selects a new tree for the night. In this instance having discovered the murdered Jane he goes to a tree he has often used. I don’t know what that means sexually. Perhaps if he had walked out on her before this he had some place he favored until reconciled.
Goro plays a prominent role. Unlike Greek mythology with which ERB was familiar where the moon is feminine in Burroughs mind the moon is masculine.
Thus it is night with the moon shining although a storm is building. Tarzan climbs the giant bole of the tree to find Sheeta sleeping on his mat in the crotch of the great limb. Thus the emasculation lurking in Burroughs’ subconscious haunts his nighttime bed. At this point the storm begins to break with gale force winds. Clouds obscure the moon and it gets dark, very dark, as dark, one might say as the tomb. It is a peculiarity of Burroughs’ heroes that they can see or find their way in the dark where you or I couldn’t. This is a very potent subconscious symbol. I’m not yet clear on Burroughs’ use of the symbol of darkness.
The Panther in this instance is a male as Burroughs refers to it as ‘he’. Thus in the night in his bed Tarzan comes upon a male sexual symbol. A quote:
Quote:
It was very dark now, darker even than it had ever been before, (see, we’re getting very serious) for almost the entire sky was overcast by thick black clouds.
Presently the man-beast paused, his sensitive nostrils dilating as he sniffed the air about him. Then with the swiftness and agility of a cat, he leaped far outward upon a swaying branch, sprang upward through the darkness, caught another, swung himself upon it and then to one still higher. What could so suddenly have transformed this matter-of-fact ascent (matter-of-fact ascent? What does that mean?) of the giant bole to the swift and wary action of his detour among the branches? You or I could have seen nothing- not even the little platform that an instant before had been just above him and which now was immediately below- but as he swung above it we should have heard an ominous growl; and then as the moon was momentarily uncovered , we should have seen both the platform dimly, and a dark mass that lay stretched upon it- A dark mass that presently, as our eyes became accustomed to the lesser darkness, would take the form of Sheeta, the panther.
Unquote.
As this is obviously a dream or subconscious sequence we don’t have to take into account improbabilities such as the moon breaking through the thick black clouds so conveniently.
Security for Tarzan is always being above things so that once his sensitive nostrils pick out Sheeta on his platform by a series of amazing acrobatics among the waving boughs in the rising gale Tarzan finds a secure place on a branch above the platform. He is now in a position to manage Sheeta. Tarzan always deals with Sheeta by descending upon him or leaping on his back.
In ‘Beasts’ he saves Akut by falling on Sheeta’s back as Sheeta descends from a tree on Akut. At the end of Leopard Men he does a standing leap onto Sheeta’s back. In this instance in a driving rain storm amidst lightening and thunder, on a whipping branch in a gale he does a somersault over Sheeta’s snout onto his back. These are acrobatics I would like to witness.
Now, in 1913’s Cave girl Part I Waldo killed the panther when it fell onto his upright spear. Spear equals penis as symbol. That pelt was given to Nadara after Waldo had worn it himself for some time. If the pelt is associated with both a homo and hetero sexuality homo in the sense of emasculation then there is a real sexual ambivalence indicated. In the case of Cave Girl Waldo assumed the masculinity of the Panther thus augmenting his own to its former state then having regained his masculinity he was able to invest Nadara with his love.
Jane is dead here so that it appears that Tarzan/Burroughs, still troubled by ambivalence as is also evidenced in 1917’s Bridge And The Kid where the Kid is a woman dressed as a man very ambivalently. In that story Bridge/Burroughs is very relieved to discover this boy he has fallen in love with is really a girl. Using his spear, a symbol of the penis, to goad Sheeta to an attack Tarzan retreats in gale force winds to the extremity of a large limb followed by the cat. Had the limb broken one assumes that ERB may have succumbed to his emasculation or latent homosexuality as he plunged back to earth. On earth he has to deal with realities. This is reminiscent of Heracles. Tarzan is a jungle Heracles. Having gotten Sheeta far out on the limb where his footing is insecure, it is at this point in the violence of the storm and wind that he somersaults onto Sheeta’s back.
Sheeta then loses his balance falling from the safety of the trees to earth with Tarzan on his back. Landing splay footed he is smashed to the ground by Tarzan’s weight. Unable to rise in time he is stabbed to death by Tarzan using his father’s knife.
Thus it would appear that so long as Tarzan is in the trees or his imagination he doesn’t really have to deal with earthly problems. But, once on the earth he has to deal with problems directly. As he has killed Sheeta on the earth one is to assume that he believes he has solved the problem of his sexual ambivalence. However the storm rages for a full twenty-four hours with whatever meaning that may have.
Thus in this traumatic day and night Tarzan/ERB’s heterosexual relationship is ended while we are led to believe he slays his emasculated homosexual ambivalence.
Having killed Sheeta Tarzan gathers an armful of fronds that in no way hinder his climbing the giant bole of the tree.
Quote:
Laying a few of the fronds upon the poles he lay down and covered himself against the rain with the others and despite the wailing of the wind and the crashing of thunder, immediately fell asleep.
Unquote.
Good thing the gale didn’t blow the fronds that covered him away. But this is a dream sequence, why would they?
Remember that these scenes of the killing of Jane and ERB’s dealing with his senseof emasculation are occurring in the Fall of 1914 at the time he was in fact writing the sequel to The Mad King, Barney Custer.
In that case Maenck was killing Barney’s alter ego Leopold while Emma/Emma stood round indecisively pondering whether to accept Barney/ERB in his new role as King. In other words ERB’s old loser self was dead while he was permanently assuming his new role as the successful ERB. In Untamed Jane/Emma is killed while Tarzan/ERB slays another troublesome alter ego or sexual problem.
In point of fact Emma Burroughs was quite right to insist that Jane not be killed. Had ERB let the death stand there would have been a gross inconsistency in the oeuvre as he already had Jane playing a prominent role in Jewels of Opar in 1915. Such a glaring inconsistency might have seriously compromised the on going story, actually a roman-a-fleuve, perhaps endangering its continuing success.
The Untamed in the title undoubtedly refers to ERB who is proclaiming his independence from Emma and the bonds of marriage. This theme too was explored in 1913’s Cave Girl which was concerned with the issue of marriage and free love.
Waldo in that story insisted upon waiting to consummate the love between he and Nadara until a minister was handy while she was puzzled as to why there was a need to wait when they were obviously meant for each other.
Untamed begun in Chicago would be finished in Los Angeles under very different circumstances than Burroughs’ life in the Windy City. As the story finished he would be the proud possessor of his own empire- Tarzana.
Burroughs just keeps getting more and more complex.
Pt. 4 Something Of Value I
October 30, 2007
Something Of Value I
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 4
A minor mythographer who emerged at the same time as Burroughs and his Tarzan was the famous character Dr. Fu Manchu of the Irishman Arthur H.S. Ward writing under the name of Sax Rohmer. While his subject is in disrepute at the present time, Rohmer was aware that the times were one of a world sea change. He sensed, along with a few others, now equally in disrepute, that the EuroAmerican tide had crested; its flow was now out.
Rohmer running counter to Western trends made careful ethnic identities even to the point of identifying Irish and Anglo sub-groups although some of the characteristics he attributed to them seem mistaken to my eye.
Nevertheless he sensed the world was entering a period of Mfecane, to use the African term, or a time of troubles to use the Western term.
The African Mfecane which occured among the Bantu tribes of South Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century, and recorded so ably by Burroughs’ major influence, Rider Haggard, was a time when rapdily expanding population pressed on available resources. This was the time when the Zulu chief Chaka organized the Zulu impis or military battalions so excitingly described by Haggard. They were used, in the Zulu phrase to ‘stamp the ememy flat’ which is to say, exterminate them.
Numerous Bantu tribes were either exterminated or driven out to find new lands which is to say stamp non-Zulu tribes flat or drive them off good lands into the desert. Such is the historical process which operates without respect to race. Now, historically all peoples consider themselves the true men while all others are an emasculated inferior sort. This was and is true of the Semites. We all know the legend of diabolical Jewish cleverness. As is well known the Jews consider themselves the Chosen People of not only their tribal god but they have made of their god a universal god that has been accepted by an astonishingly large number of people. The Chinese peoples, which Dr. Fu Manchu represented, consider themselves of the Celestial Empire or Middle Kingdom to which all must bend the knee. The Arab Semites pray: Praise be to Allah, Lord of Creation…Guide us in the right path, the path of those whom you have favored.
Thus both leading Semitic peoples believe they are Chosen peoples which explains that conflict. In the United States, of course, we believe we have god on our side. We are naturally right being unable to be wrong. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
Strangely enough the contemporary world believes it is living outside the historical process, that evolution has ended leaving all species in stasis whereas nothing could be further from the truth. A mythographer like Sax Rohmer is in possession of the truth. This was made apparent with the success of the Bolshevik Revolution when Mfecane took definite shape.
In this long wave action by the Jewish people that began with the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi in 1666 it seemed momentarily that the messianic years of 1913-28 would be crowned with success, that the Jews would achieve world domination by 1928. The Bolshevik Revolution created a storm of anti-Jewish reaction.
This period from the Revolution of 1917-24 when Lenin died was one of intense apprehensive literature about worldwide Jewish intentions. Not counting the new Nazi reaction in Germany there was a burst of literature criticizing the Jews. In the United States, usually so placid, a reaction was led by Henry Ford then at the crest of his reputation as an auto maker. He had his reasons.
Ford thought he was dealing with an intellectual problem. He wasn’t aware that he had involved himself in an emascualtion contest, or pissing match as they are vulgarly called. The Jews, of course, never let the problem be examined on its merits but immediately raised the spectre of anti-Semitism. Ford was accordingly branded an anti-Semite. Why he or anyone else shoud favor the manhood of Jews over his own is, or should be, open to conjecture but no one can withstand the charge of anti-Semitism and remain respectable in his community. Ford lost the fight on the grounds of anti-Semitism, not the facts, while the Jews now confess to his accusations.
Disregarding all the benefits Ford conferred on civilization, which are very, very many, his fellows deserted him and he has no reputation today.
Thus, as of 1924, it seemed to the Jews as though the millennium had come but then Lenin died. Stalin seized the reins of Soviet government while Hitler’s star was in the ascendance in Germany.
The pall of Freud’s vision of the unconscious spread over the world. All other interpretations of the unconscious had been suppressed. Men like Jean Genet were coming into their own. Then, a year before the messianic years ended when things didn’t look quite so rosy Freud wrote another book, calling this one the Future Of An Illusion. This is a difficult book to understand. To merely condemn religion in the abstract seems redundant, even puerile. Freud appears to be responding to the defeat of the Jewish revolution in the Soviet Union. This must be the illusion whose future concerns him. While Hitler had not yet crushed the Judaeo-Communist revolution in Germany matters were in hand.
Stalin was neutralizing, if not yet eliminating, the cadre that executed the Revolution. It would be another two years before Freud realized that his instructions in 1917 had been in vain. In fact his releasing of his negative vision of the subconscious was about to backfire on him in the hands of Stalin and Hitler in a spectacular way.
I think that it is also signficant that, in these later years of his life, the Castration Complex became more signficant in his thinking, almost displacing the Oedipus Complex in importance. His concentration on it has the sound of an hysterical shriek as the failure of the millennium would be a type of group castration.
For the mythographers, the Burroughs of 1911-17 had been a plateau. Burroughs had brought all the mythological strands together. Like the arrow shot in the air to land one knew not where now one knew where Burroughs’ writing had been leading. It was his turn to inseminate many minds. Those minds no longer had only books to disseminate their views but they had even more potent forms of communication. The nickelodeon of the eighteen nineties had evolved into movies shown in palaces. Looking back, the early movie theatres were a temporary but spectacular moment. In my hometown the chif theatre was appropriately called: The Temple.
The movie makers seized on the psychological projections of the mythographers which could be interpreted and manipulated quite independently of the intentions of the authors. This brought a number of projections which might have been overlooked into the forefront of world consciousness. The exploration of Bram Stoker’s Dracula began in earnest, soon bearing little relation to Stoker’s book. Another stunning projection that would have gone unnoticed except for the movies was Gaston Le Roux’s Phantom Of The Opera. While not a particularly good book, although arresting, the character was coopted by a Hollywood producer while the book was being serialized in a New York paper. Strangely, the Phantom has become a counterpart of Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean among the Red/Liberals.
Radio had come along in 1920 to be a force from the thirties on.
Movies and radio appealed directly to the subconscious in the brain stem through the eyes and ears which are connected to the brain stem more or less bypassing the conscious mind. With the movies there is too much content to consciously assimilate while the speed with which it passes leaves no room for consideration. Books on the other hand are read into the brain stem but are immediately evaluated by the conscious mind.
At least until the emergence of video tapes beginning in the 1970s movies were an ephemeral form of entertainment. Memories of movies are extremely unreliable as the subconscious manipulates the material for its own uses. Today one can review this ephemera which had such an influence on you, understanding and correcting any misconceptions.
Even more ephemeral and now lost forever was the radio show. One that left the most indelible impression was influenced by Burrough’s work. That most mortal but penetrating pyschological projection was The Shadow.
Today he can live only in the minds of those who were there although abut 350 pulp novels were written about the Shadow of which 280 were written by one man, if you can believe it. He was Walter Gibson. One believed that the Shadow stepped through the creaking door of the Inner Sanctum.
I have never seen the pulp novels but, as Gibson was in charge of both the show and the novels, the results must be the same. The stories were unimportant, as indeed all stories are, the important thing was and is the attitude, the myth. What mythographers call the truth. Thus if you hear only the literal story you have missed the real story. All good writing is done in keys.
The shows could only have been written post-Freud as well as post-Burroughs. the images do not appeal to the conscious mind.
The Shadow had learned ‘the hypnotic power to cloud men’s minds so that they cannot see him.’ (p. 608 On The Air: The Encyclopedia Of Old Time Radio, John Dunning, Oxford 1998) This may sound like so much hocus pocus, yet if one reads Freud’s Group Psychology carefully one will see that what Freud is proposing is hypnotizing groups to achieve one’s ends unnoticed.
If you watch the movies of Hitler working up a crowd you are watching a master hypnotist at work. Perhaps he also had read Le Bon. He comes quietly to the fore after his introduction, stands quietly watching and listening, his hand drops down to manipulate some items on the table. The audience, in their thousands, sit waiting in anticipation. Hitler begins to speak, quietly, indifferently; then his pace picks up, his intensity increases, passion flows from his voice while he gestures wildly, dramatically bringing his huge audience into a trance which he is able to satisfy completely before terminating the seance in a wild orgy of screaming indignation and wildly flailing gesticulation. It may not look impressive viewing it with cool dispassion on film but he’s good, even an artist.
Watch him. You don’t even have to understand German. He was terrific.
Freud also, merely through the force of his personality and reputation was able, through his writing, to influence large numbers of influential people, through them the masses, just by telling them in abstruse terms what they wanted to hear. To wit: Let your unconscious rule, the more sex you have the better a person you will be, do not allow any fancy you may have to be repressed. It’s bad for you. The unconscious, sex and free expression of the libido are good. You like that don’t you? If you act on it you may as well consider yourself hypnotized.
The Shadow in the Freudian sense and the Burroughsian sense was a man of many identities. One becomes a personality of many facets in the unconscious, one might almost say multiple personalities. Indeed, the Shadow lived in the everyday world under a borrowed identity not even his own. “To two persons only is the Shadow’s true identity known- that of Kent Allard, internationally known aviator- and those persons are Xinca Indians, servants picked up by Allard during a stay among their tribe in Central America. A guise often used by the Shadow is that of Lamont Cranston, world renowned big game hunter and traveler, when Cranston is away on his travels. This is by leave of the real Cranston, a man of deep understanding.” (The Pulps: Fifty Years Of American Pop Culture, compiled by Tony Goodstone, Bonanza 1970, p. 228)
Cranston must indeed have been a man of deep understanding while Kent Allard was freed from responsibility for his acts. Nice situation if you can get it. Like all the psychological projections the Shadow was a man of many identities. Most of the projections were experts of disguise, being able to imitate a vast variety of human conditions perfectly from street sweeper to nuclear scientist. Real Urban Spacemen. In Burroughs’ case he created a number of alter egos including John Carter, John Clayton also known as Tarzan, Lord Passmore and other identities, David Innes and Normal Bean. Unlike Freudian/Liberals they were and are more aligned with a firm grip on morality. Jekyll to the core. As the Shadow said: Crime must go! He gave his mocking laugh and said: ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.’ Purge your hearts f0r there is no escaping the Shadow.
There was a lot of evil lurking in the hearts of men during the thirties. A very large part of it was centered in Germany and the Soviet union where the epic struggle between good and evil was taking shape that was to end in that catastrophic war. I know you will think that the evil was represented by Adolf Hitler and the good by Judaeo-Communism.
Hitler has been represented as the nadir of evil. He was certainly one of the bad boys of history but then his Freudian style subconscious had been released. Besides, as I have pointed out he was the antagonist and not the protagonist; in other words he could not have existed without Judaeo-Communism, possibly not without Freud: he was acting in self-defense.
Hitler was not outside history as some would have it. It is time to integrate him into the historical process so the period can be understood. The period from 1913 to 1945 was one in which the great goddess Kali danced merrily around the world while Shiva played the pipes. Death is the eternal dance of life in the deepest mythological sense. Nor do Shiva and Kali care how many or who die. Many go, many more come. Since 1913 mankind, not Hitler, but mankind has murdered its hundreds of millions but Nature has replaced the dead with billions. After the human destruction of seven decades the world population has grown to life stifling levels. If the world population is twelve billion by 2050 as has been predicted, mankind will see Kali dance more wildly than ever before while Shiva plays faster, faster and more madly still. Hitler an arch demon? What? Grow up.
From the point of view of Religious Consciousness and this holds true for Judaism, Christianity and Moslemism anything and everything that happens, is merely the will of god. God works in mysterious way his wonders to perform while his mind is beyond the ken of man. I mean…if you believe this religious stuff then you have to accept all of it or else. This is religious fact! Thus Hitler was merely peforming the will of god as he had no other choice. God had created set and setting. From the Religious point of view Hitler must therefore be blameless while god is accountable for all that transpired.
From the scientific Darwinian evolutionary point of view the great wars were inevitable. The wars were the inevitable consequence of natural selection. I know that the general consensus is that not only do we live outside the historical process but that all the evolutionary rules have been set aside in our case. To those people I say believe as you will. In point of fact the struggle for human special existence goes on today as it did in the thirties and forties. One species will triumph over the others if society as we know it is not ended by natural causes by c. 2050.
The period under consideration was a confllict between Slavs, Germans and Jews. It occurred adjacent to and was partially caused by Jewish millennial ideas. Germans and Slavs had been contending for centuries both along the Slavic German border as well as in Courland which ran around the southern and eastern Baltic and within Russian itself.
During the nineteenth century the Czars encouraged Germans to colonize the Ukraine as farmers. A large German colony was established at the mouth of the Volga River. An alien Semitic people, the Jews, resided in Germany and Russia. While the Jews claim to have been loyal German and Russian subjects this notion is nonsense which will not bear up to historical analysis. They were part of the international Jewish community residing in their respective States. Just as the Germans and Slavs wished them to accept their national identities, as Semites the Jews wished to impose their world view on them. Hence one has a classic example of Natural Selection, varieties and species in conflict. In addition Hitler and the Germans were suffering from Emasculation as a result of the Great War while in the new USSR the State was being administered by Emasculated formerly subject peoples.
While one may say this contributed to the savagery of the period from 1913 to 1945 what we have here is a classic Mfecane or Time of Troubles that is still developing. The only solution was to ‘stamp flat’ or exterminate rival combatants. This was merely a part of the historical and evolutionary process. A harsh reality but true. Kali don’t mind, Krishna plays on.
Had the Jews been powerful enough they would have stamped flat both the Germans and Russians just as they began to do with with the Crimeans and as they would do with the Palestinians if let loose today. As it was, both Hitler and Stalin set about exterminating the Semitic Jews. Stalin would have completed the job in 1954 but Kali beckoned to him first.
The Jews always preferred German culture so that in the nineteenth century when the Russians compelled them to take surnames a great many Jews resident in Russia chose German names. As Judaeo-Communists they moved back and forth between Germany and Russia creating the illusion from 1917 to 1945 of German collaboration with Russia. To have called them Jews would have opened one to the charge of anti-Semitism. Who needs that?
If the Czars had attempted to Russify the subject peoples it was as nothing compared to the effort of the USSR under Stalin. Nationality was outlawed under the Communists. Stalin made the resident Germans a special target. Unable to dent the Volga colony’s nationalism he merely exterminated them after WWII.
You could watch Kali dance and Shiva pipe.
Reverting to the Religious Consciousness what purpose of God’s will did Hitler serve? I’m sure His mind is too deep for me, but if you’re religious this point has to be considered. Well, at the time the Popular Front governments in 1936 that were all Red, Judaeo-Communism seemed on the verge of world conquest from China to the USA. Except for Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan Reds were in the ascendant. Even Germany and Italy had adopted variants of Red socialism.
While it may not appear to be so at first glance Hitler smashed the Red economy. The USSR never truly recovered from the war, limping along until its economic collapse during Reagan’s administration in the US.
The war also gave the democratic forces of the US time to organize their resistance to the Red Menace. Unfocussed and in disarray before the war the Scientific element seized control of the State Department and the armed forces so that with the death of the Popular Front president, Roosevelt, the United States actually assumed the role of Hitler and his Nazis as the bulwark against Communism forcing the Jews in the United States to reconsider their position vis-a-vis Communism. It was really at this point that many Jews became anti-Communist in the United States. Hence the Jews assumed their traditional good cop/bad cop role. The US position against Communism gave rise to Jewish charges of Fascism in their bad cop role.
If from a religious point of view everything that occurs is the will of god then god must have been a Red baiter. Today’s Reds take note.
Nevertheless as the mythographers to a man were opposed to Red totalitarianism they all came under attack from the Red/Liberal forces. Every attempt was made to abort established careers while stifling new ones.
If you remember a while back I described a scene in which Commissars were reading Tarzan to employees of the Worker’s Paradise. That fact made Edgar Rice Burroughs a marked man. A concerted effort was begun to interfere with his career. Unfortunately for the Reds this effort resulted in a dozen of the best novels of Burroughs’ career supplying him with a fresh batch of material.
At the same time publishing became more difficult for him while his editors at the pulps became hypercritical of material they had once begged for. Also at this critical time Burroughs changed secretaries. His new secretary, who became his business manager and de facto head of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. was a man named Ralph Rothmund. Rothmund claimed to be Scotch although I’m sure the sept of Rothmund must have been lacking its own Tartan.
The name translates from the German to Red World. It may be coincidence or it may be a joke. Certainly when an organization is being infiltrated the most sought after post is that of secretary. All information passes through the secretary’s hands. Rasputin, for instance, not surprisingly had a Jewish secretary which led to the charges of his complicity with the Germans. You may be sure that Rasputin was not complicit while you may be equally sure that his secretary was. At least with the German Jews.
There hasn’t been much work done on Rothmund by Burroughsians nor do I have any new information to report but let us examine Rothmund’s record as secretary and business manager. What was the result of his twenty-five years of work? Was Burroughs further ahead or further behind when Rothmund went to his greater reward?
The man nearly brought the business to a halt.
He disrupted all relations with the publishers of Burroughs’ early novels, bringing the flow of royalties to a halt in 1946, they had been miniscule even laughable since 1940. Nor did he actively pursue the publication of titles owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. The lucrative radio show was discontinued in 1936. In what some fancy as a coup Rothmund sold the movie rights to Tarzan to MGM for a flat fifty thousand a picture, no residuals. By 1940 Burroughs was so broke, or told he was by his business manager, that Rothmund advised him to leave the country for Hawaii where the great creator of Tarzan lived on the meager $250.00 a month that Rothmund allotted him. What was Rothmund’s salary at this time? How much was the corporation earning?
In addition this supposed business manager allowed Burroughs’ copyrights to lapse, never renewing them. By 1945 the most popular titles of Burroughs were available to whoever wanted to publish them. Amazingly no one did while Burroughs’ long time reprint publishers, who knew the copyrights were lapsed, Grossett and Dunlap, honored argreements they were under no obligation to do.
Burroughs’ bacon was pulled from the fire by an earlier more lucrtive movie deal he had nogotiated with a producer named Sol Lesser. When MGM tired of the Tarzan series they let Lesser assume the rights. The revenues from Lesser’s productions defeated Rothmund’s apparent purpose.
Still, after Burroughs died in 1950 Rothmund made no attempt to keep any Burroughs’ titles in print. From 1950 until 1963 at which later date publishers discovered that the copyrights had never been renewed, nothing was available but a few titles from Grossett and Dunlap.
Even then, Burroughs’ most famous book, Tarzan Of The Apes, had been out of print for twenty years or more. Some business manager.
Thus, as is probably true, as a Red infiltrator Rothmund had destroyed the career of the arch Americanist, Edgar Rice Burroughs. the greatest of the mythographers was almost silenced.
While Rothmund worked to silence the Master, the Freud/Hitler/Stalin confrontation in Europe broke out into the most destructive war the world had ever seen. Unlike the previous wars there were no rational minds seeking to ameliorate the damage. Freud had unleashed the Hyde-like destructive subconscious of the West. Hitler, who had always said if the Jews involved Europe in another disaster like the Great War, they would pay the price, meant it. He was no empty boaster. He had the will, he had the ways and means. In the coldest, most scientific way imaginable he systematically rounded the Jews up deeding them to the flames Wow! Not since the great Roman manhunt of 135. Here was new meaning to the Jewish concept of passing the enemy through the fires. Wow!
Hitler raged East and West but he raged beyond his power. As must have inevitably happened before the first shot was fired, after the initial surprise German forces were driven back on all fronts. Driven into isolation by his enemies there was no possibility for a negotiated terminus to the war. In the struggle between the revolution and counter-revolution the only end could be unconditional surrender. That sick madman in Washington, crippled in body and mind, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, working from his subconscious no less than Hitler, insanely persisted in the demand for unconditional surrender. What a different world it would have been if the West had accepted Germany’s surrender before the Russians entered Poland. Heck, Roosevelt wouldn’t have had to honor any deal he made with the Germans any more than his mentor Wilson did in the Great War. What kind of man was Roosevelt anyway?
So here we have a man emasculated by disease, a seriously emasculated man by circumstance and a politically emasculated man directing the affairs of the three most powerful States in the world. Wow!
In defeat Hitler acted in the self-destructive way of the emasculated. He knew he had to die so he wanted nothing left standing in Europe when he was gone. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were nothing loath to help him.
Hitler ordered Paris wired for total destruction. The city was to be blown off the earth in the face of the advancing allies. Wow! However, with the intellectual superstructure of the City of Light destroyed it would have collapsed into the Sewers of Paris, that would have remained intact. Freud had destroyed Morality as D.H. Lawrence had feared:
Quote:
With dilated hearts we watched Freud disappearing into the cavern of darkness….He was making to the origins. We watched his ideal candle falter and go small. Then we waited as men do wait, always expecting the wonder of wonders. He came back with dreams to sell.
But sweet heaven, what merchandise!….What was there in the case?….Nothing but a huge slimy serpent of sex, and heaps of excrement, and myriad repulsive little horrors spawned between sex and excrement.
Unquote.
Wow!
Double Wow!
Yes, Freud hd destroyed the conscious mind and morality and reaped the Sewers of Paris. As the payback for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain the Jews had stultified Europe. What came out of the sewers as intellectual Paris burned?
Jean Genet!
Of course any right thinking person is appalled by the course of history from 1913 to 1945 (or from year one to the present not excluding what went before) but for every right thinking person there are at least two who aren’t. The Third Reich was a paradise for a significant minority. Jean Genet was one of those. Check out a French movie titled ‘Dr. Petiot’ if you want to see another. (The Varieties of Sexual Experience) Genet enjoyed the period. He was a man come into his own. As he has been quoted previously, he delighted in the union of the criminal mind with authority. Why wouldn’t he?
But just as the French Revolution allowed the Marquis de Sade scope for his personality, Napoleon, when he assumed the reins of government clapped de Sade into the insane asylum at Charenton. So the Post-war Fourth Republic sentenced the petty thief Jean Genet to life imprisonment.
Genet might very well have died in prison but for the fact that he, while lying in his bunk smelling his farts, composed the novel entitled: Our Lady Of The Flowers. (What scents are these?) While respectable non-Communist writers were being hounded out of literature this criminal, homosexual, severely emasculated creep found a publisher. Saint, indeed!
Not only that, he found a friend. Jean Paul Sartre had surfaced in 1936 with his novel: Nausea. From this novel he developed what was known in the post-war world as existentialism. This notion was supposedly philosophy. I have been called an existentialist by people who should know what it is but I have to say that I have never understood what Sartre means by it. I’ve even read his trilogy, Roads to Freedom. Still don’t know what he’s talking about; I deny all charges.
Nevertheless by war’s end he had a tremendous reputation within France and without. For some reason he and other literati felt that any criminal who can write a book shouldn’t be in prison, as though Genet had been sentenced for the crime of never having written a book. So they sprung Genet. He could now steal with impunity. Ain’t life just too funny for words. Sartre later wrote a book of some six hundred odd pages about this petty thief entitled: St. Genet: Thief and Martyr. The two must go together. Sort of Geminis perhaps.
Genet had Sartre’s numbers. He dedicated his autobiography, The Thief’s Journal to Sartre: a Sartre au Castor. To Sartre as Castor. If Sartre was Castor then his twin brother Genet, was Polydeukes. As we all know Castor was the mortal twin while Polydeukes was the immortal. Genet was prescient as well as mocking. Today his myth lives on while Sartre and his existentialism is all but forgotten.
The point is that Genet was instrumental in creating the cult of the homosexual. It was through him that the homosexual was allied to the post-war Red coalition. In this union of Emasculates that seized control of US culture, if not always the government, the criminal mores of the homosexual as taught by Genet formed the basis of Red morality, or immorality, as you would have it. Freud was wrong in thinking men can live without the notion of a moral code.
The great mythographers who had attempted to give mankind a positive approach to morality by a union of the conscious and subconscious minds with consciousness preeminent were driven underground as the Red/Liberals seized control of the media preventing any view but their own being expressed.
Freudian visions seem to have triumphed, still, though Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950 his great psychological projection Tarzan lived on. He still lives.
To recapitulate: In the course of evolution a new type of man came into being in mid-nineteenth century who required a new vision of psychology. Society, for our purposes here, was thereby split into two divisions. One of Scientific man and two factions of Religious man. One of the latter was the reaction of Christianity which refused to make any accommodation with the new reality while its fellow the Red/Liberal faction while in as violent a reaction as the Christians adopted pseudo-scientific modes while seeking to subvert the Scientific Consciousness.
On the literary level the cudgel of Science was taken up by a group of neo-mythographers who treated psychology and evolution according to the tenets of science.
The Red/Liberal faction developed a revolutionary program guided by the religious conception of science led on the literary level by Sigmund Freud.
Taking the various concepts of the unconscious developed at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries Freud twisted them to his purposes to envision the unconscious as a bale of evil impulses; he then convinced the West to release their impulses under the rubric of liberating the unconscious. The immediate result was an orgy of hate, sadism and murder that lasted, for our purposes from 1917 until 1945 at which time the old order collapsed.
The mythographers who had been less assertive were eclipsed by the Red/Liberals who now led the post-war era. They continued their campaign to sabotage the Scientific Consciousness by instigating a subtle reign of terror from the released unconscious.
Having now completed a survey of the first hundred years centered on the concepts of psychology I will now consider the same period from the point of view of evolution as reflected in the writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the final part I will entwine both the psychological and evolutionary strands in a survey of society from 1945 to the present.
I dreamed I saw Ed Burroughs
As live as live could be.
‘Ah, but Ed, you’re dead.’ Says I.
‘I never died.’ Says he.
‘I never died.’ Says he.
As he stood smiling at me he had Something Of Value in his hand which he gave to me. It was a copy of Tarzan. I became as a pillar of smoke leading the people through the desert to freedom.
End of Something of Value I
Something Of Value II follows.
I, Dynamo 