A Review: Pt. 6, Tarzan Triumphant by Edgar Rice Burroughs
August 5, 2011
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#15 Tarzan Triumphant
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 6
Threads And Strands Of The Web
For I must speak what wisdom would conceal,
And truth, invidious to the great, reveal.
–Homer
More than likely it is a coincidence that Burroughs wrote a fictional account of time and space weaving a web at this time, for Fate was bringing together threads and strands of the web of his own life in a picture of unparalleled opportunity and deadly peril. The decisions Burroughs would make would determine the outcome. His life could have gone another way. Or, perhaps, Burroughs sensed the impending crises and fictioned them in an attempt to deal with them.
We are already aware of the conflicts with the Judaeo-Communists. It seems clear that they were the original aggressors and that Burroughs was in reaction to them, in other words, on the defensive. Thus these first two Tarzan novels of the thirties are direct attacks on both aggressors. If Burroughs expected counter attacks there seems to be no evidence that he prepared for them. He never seems to have sat down to coolly analyze the problem in order to have a plan.
In fact, there seems to be little evidence that he ever actually realized the consequences of his success or how to handle it. While he had incorporated himself he made no effort to corporately structure his writing enterprise. In point of fact as a creative artist he was fundamentally incapable of running a structured business. Doing so would have interfered with his creative function. In fact, I am convinced that he dissipated his creative energies by becoming involved in business decisions to the extent he did.
Developing an organization is very difficult. While he should have done this, without a very fortuitous combination of circumstances it is very doubtful he could have. Hollywood was full of sharpers ready to take advantage of creative talent and in this case and nearly all others they did.
On the positive side, from 1911 to, say, 1928 ERB had created an unparalleled intellectual property in Tarzan. One in a zillion chance. As the twenties developed unparalleled opportunities to exploit the property evolved.
Apart from publishing, the three key profit centers were comics, movies and radio. All three strands came to fruition as the thirties began. Each required a slightly different approach. Each required thinking out with an intellectual departure from the past.
At this crucial moment ERB’s past arose to drag him down from behind. He was unable to make the emotional transition from what was essentially an emotionally battered youth to a successful, affluent man in control of his destiny. He remained psychologically attached to his personal relationship to Tarzan as an aspect of his personality rather than objectifying the character as a psychological projection for the world. He had prepared the way to make Tarzan a savior man-god but then couldn’t separate him from his own personality. If Fate had thrown the right people in his way they could have done this for him.
Thus rather than maximize his financial returns he essentially shot his feet off. He carped at the various media companies to the point where he was viewed as troublesome, an undesirable actually. Thus while he expected great financial returns including the means to buy a yacht, he sabotaged his own efforts to obtain them.
He belittled the returns of the comic strip for instance, bemoaning that it only returned thirty dollars a day. Well, that was eleven thousand dollars a year, every year. He could count on it. His MGM contract for Tarzan, The Ape Man provided him the exact same return. Twenty-two thousand divided by two years is eleven thousand a year.
At the time ERB signed the MGM contract he had a very valuable intellectual property already fully developed but he had developed a reputation among the Studios. The Studios had already had extensive dealings with him from the silent era. ERB, without a plan to market Tarzan had accepted whatever money came his way. Two of his titles had been sold in 1921 although production of them had been shelved. In 1927 FBO Studios decided to film Tarzan And The Golden Lion. While this film was lost for decades a print of the film was discovered which was issued on DVD in 2006 so that it can now be viewed.
In my opinion FBO did handsomely by ERB. A good clear scenario was written by William Wing that remained true to the spirit of Burroughs’ work; perhaps more than it ought to have in a movie sense. The filming, the photography is terrific; it has never been done better, not by MGM, not by RKO. It is true that Wing invented a sister for Tarzan but this is a minor point.
I find it difficult to undertand what ERB was disgruntled about except that another writer was handling his alter ego. The difference between a movie scenario and a book is very distinct. There would have been no way to get the entire convoluted story of Golden Lion on the screen so Wing wisely chose to develop a variation on the story of the Valley of Diamonds. Even so he threw in an earthquake scene a la Jewels Of Opar and Tarzan’s jumping the gap in the tunnel.
If anything his attempt to write as closely to Burroughs as he did lessened the impact of the film with some needless clutter. If, in 1935’s New Adventures Of Tarzan for which Burroughs provided the story idea, Dearholt attempted to tell the story more or less as Burroughs wrote, then the result was a hopeless mish mash. The movie was no truer to Burroughs’ Tarzan than FBO’s film, while lacking the clarity and force of the latter. Burroughs should have been grateful to FBO for an excellent movie. My idea of the best of the lot even though silent.
Had I been associated with FBO I would have found ERB’s criticisms nitpicking and offensive. After all FBO broke the boycott ERB had been under since 1922. The FBO movie triggered a response from Universal which held the rights to Jungle Tales and Jewels Of Opar. These titles were released as Tarzan The Mighty and Tarzan The Tiger starring Frank Merrill. At present there is no print of Tarzan The Mighty while as of December 5, 2006 I am still awaiting the release of Tarzan The Tiger. ERB once again was unhappy with these films, voicing loud complaints. All this carping could have done little for his reputation among the Studios. Before the long hiatus of Tarzan movies from 1921 to 1927 he had been run off the lot during the filming.
According to the ERBzine Timeline for the ’30s ERB approached MGM in 1930 asking $75,000 for a movie and was rebuffed. If this is true, $22,000 in 1931 was quite a comedown. MGM solved ERB’s querulousness by obtaining the rights to do with the character as they wished. They promptly disdained Burrughs’ storylines for their own while changing the character of Tarzan from that of an international sophisticate to that of a feral boy.
As the first full sound Tarzan, MGM hit the jackpot with the victory cry of the bull ape. The Tarzan yell would be the trademark of the charcter, although hardly a blood chilling fearsome holler. Burroughs himself couldn’t do better as Herman Brix in New Adventures merely growls out a long drawn Tar-man-gan-eee with the last sylable in falsetto. More laughable than fearsome.
In between these two films Sol Lesser released a monstrosity starring Buster Crabbe. Lesser never got the handle on Tarzan on his own, instead borrowing the MGM Characterization when he acquired the rights from them.
Lesser and his brother Irving were independent producers of some substance. Sol was born in 1890 in Spokane, Washington, dying at 90 in 1980. There is even a biography of his life. Not easy to find and not available on any site when I looked. If anybody knows where one is or having one could make a copy for me it would be much appreciated.
Lesser’s father who was in the nickelodeon business died in 1907 in San Francisco leaving the business to Sol and brother Irving. Sol got involved in distribution in 1910 eventually forming the Golden Gate Film Exchange in 1915.
In that year San Francisco’s infamous Barbary Coast was shuttered. Before the closure Lesser filmed the area, selling the movie. It would be interesting if the film was still around.
He made the right moves. After distribution he became a producer for First National and then formed a chain of movie theatres. After an aborted retirement he reentered production forming his own independent studio called either Principle or Principal Pictures. David Fury spells the name Principal in his Kings Of The Jungle and that sounds right. This was apparently Sol’s status when he acquired the rights to Tarzan from a third party in 1928 and when he made the Crabbe abortion in 1933.
Lesser was influential in Hollywood. He made it a point to know and be known. In the early thirties it was he who was responsible for introducing Disney to Joseph Schench (pronounced Skenk) and facilitating Disney’s move from Columbia to United Artists.
One can’t be sure of his politics from the sources cited but according to the New York Times:
…Lesser forsook production for distribution again, returning to the creative end of moviemaking in 1931 when, through is friendshlip with writer Upton Sinclair, he became involved with the Sergei Eisenstein project, Thunder Over Mexico.
Thunder Over Mexico was undoubtedly a Communist diatribe. Sol Lesser while involved with consevatives like Disney and Burroughs, also played the other side of the street with the likes of Upton Sinclair and the Jewish film maker, Sergei Eisenstein of Battleship Potemkin fame.
It would seem probable that he at least knew such luminaries as Louis B. Mayer and possibly Irving Thalberg. Even though he could have foiled both Burroughs and MGM with his prior rights to Tarzan, he characteristically stepped aside, for remuneration of course, to let their films play through. It would be interesting to know how and why he obtained his rights from a third party and how they had obtained theirs.
One doesn’t know what his relationship to Mayer and MGM was at this time but it is noteworthy that he acquired exclusive rights to Tarzan when MGM abandoned the profitable series. Under Lesser the movies continued to gross two to three million a picture.
Sound movies should have been a gold mine for Burroughs if he had handled himself properly. Instead through his impulsiveness and vanity there were at least four competing Tarzans on the screens from 1930 to 1935. This must have created confusion in the public’s mind, while injuring Burroughs’ financial returns.
At the time sound brought the potential of immense movie profits to Burroughs the thread of radio also came to maturity about 1930. While the evangelists were quick to capitalize on the potential of radio, Burroughs wasn’t far behind. Perhaps the success of Aimee Semple Mcpherson showed him the way.
As the decade dawned, his eye turned in radio’s direction. By 1932 he was successful in launching a show. Once again ERB failed to analyze the difference between books and a new medium. Radio was for him the most lucrative of all his ventures. His revenues from radio equaled his income from all other sources combined. This income stream could have continued unabated through the thirties but, once again, ERB interfered with the show rather than contributed. Undoubtedly because of his constant carping the first series was not renewed. A second series was launched which was also discontinued. From 1935 until his death he was unable to get on radio again. After his death in 1950 a new series was launched.
Thus, between publishing, comics, movies and radio ERB was provided opportunities to exploit his great labor in creating the ultimate intellectual property of the twentieth century and blew it. The personality forming psychology of his youth popped up to prevent his realizing his most cherished dreams in this sphere of his life as it did in his relationship to women.
b.
If ERB had read his Homer at some earlier time, or possibly, earlier times in his life, it seems evident that he reread the Odyssey, for sure, at this time. The evidence is prominent in these five novels, especially Triumphant and City Of Gold. A text in all five novels is the struggle between the La aspect of his Anima and that of Jane. Subconsciously he had steered his love life to this critical juncture where he would have to choose one and reject the other.
There may have been a fortuitousness in his choosing to concentrate on his own Odyssey at this time. He was able to capitalize on a number of good story ideas, while on the other hand a major story line of the Odyssey is the examination of a man’s control of his sexual desires. A key story of this aspect is the story of the seductress Circe. By inducing all men to abandon themselves to unbridled sexual desire she turns them all into pigs. A lesson for contemporary times. Odysseus avoids this by having a pocketful of Moly. Moly is some sort of charm that allows him to resist Circe’s seductions.
Thus Odysseus retains his manly integrity while securing the release of his crew. The Sirens, Calypso and the other women are all temptations for Odysseus to abandon his manhood for the luxuries of sex or in other word, the Matriarchy. He resists them all to return home to Penelope in Ithaca where she sits lonely endlessly weaving her web.
One can’t know directly how Burroughs read the story or even if the above details registered with him; nevertheless these five novels are about a man’s relationships with women and more specifically they concern the details of ERB’s relationships with women. The story as told by him is a troubled one.
It would appear that his cherished Anima image of the previous forty years or so, La of Opar, no longer answered his needs, so at the end of Invincible Tarzan abandons La of Opar. She and Opar disappear from the oeuvre never to be mentioned again.
In real life perhaps La has been replaced by Florence who now figures as the Golden Girl. With the appearance of Jezebel in Triumphant the Golden Girl makes her first appearance to dominate the stage until Lion Man and the end of this five novel series.
In Triumphant the Jane aspect which has been missing for the last couple novels parachutes back into ERB’s life. He marries her off to the stable aspect of his Animus while pairing the Golden Girl with the low life aspect of his Animus.
Emma had always said ERB was a low brow so perhaps he found it too unpleasant aping high brow manners giving up the fight to indulge that aspect of his Animus more comfortable to him.
In this struggle Florence had been removed from the scene. Back during the writing of this novel Burroughs quickly opted to join his low life aspect with his sexual desire for the Golden Girl. His Moly gave out on him. Thus Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick is transformed into Old Timer of Leopard Man while Jezebel becomes the platinum blonde, Kali Bwana.
Having made the decision to take the Golden Girl he has to eliminate the Jane aspect which he does in City Of Gold. Perhaps wavering a trifle in Lion Man he seems to have created a type of middle Tarzan Anima figure in Rhonda Terry. While he rejects Naomi/Jane he seems to have misgivings about Balza/Florence as the Golden Girl.
But, by this time the die had been cast so that in real life he does leave Emma to begin his life with Florence as a born again sex hound. As Old Timer in Leopard Men he says he was entitled to some pleasure in life and by God he was going to take it.
So, in both his business life and his personal life his past rose up and bit him in the behind destroying any chance he had to realize his true desires. I’m afraid I have to look at the remainder of his life as a failure as he was unable to eliminate the psychological impediments placed in his way by his early life. Not that he didn’t try. He appears to have studied psychology trying to find a way through to the other side of the maze of consciousness. Thus we have the subterranean passages too dark for anyone to find their way, yet his characters do. As he searches for a way out, the past rises up in the shape of deformed monsters like the Oparians beneath the Sacred City.
Or the round about way Tarzan and La found their way out of the lion cage in Invincible to be betrayed by the Old Man who professed to be true to La. Who was the Old Man? The shade of the past? David Adams has brought emphasis to this scene in his review of “The Ancient Dead of the City of Horz,” itself a dead city on the shores of a dead sea in Burroughs Bulletin #68.
By the writing of The Ancient Dead, ERB no longer had any hope to escape his past, while at the same time it was too late.
So, as the matter turned out, this period from 1930 to 1934 was the final crucial period in ERB’s life where he could have taken control of his destiny. He apparently sensed that the threads and strands of the web of his life were being brought together by Fate.
I neither condemn nor advise, unlike the literary fashion of today. I assume no superior airs, nor do I have a right to do so, but the fact is that had he been able to control his sexuality while restraining his impulsiveness, Fate might have been kinder to him at this juncture. As he was unable to order his psychology Fate, as it were, laid him low.
The critical junctures were the impetuous signing with MGM, his abandonment of Emma and his mismanagement of his radio affairs.
I have now covered four of the five Tarzan novels of this period. The last, The City City Of Gold deals with his ferocious sexual needs that destroyed his chances for success.
A Review: Pt. 5, Tarzan Triumphant by Edgar Rice Burroughs
August 4, 2011
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#15 Tarzan Triumphant
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 5
In The Footsteps Of The Lord
a.
If anything the action of this novel reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man just as the invasion of Opar brings strong recollections of the last story of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. In the latter all the great fictions of mankind, fairies, ogres, and whatnot have been driven from earth by Reason taking refuge on Mars. But as the true condition of Mars becomes known their world crumbles and disappears as there is no place in the universe left for them.
That fate will never overtake Tarzan as he represents very real hopes, dreams and desires of mankind. Even as the old world and old heaven of the Piscean Age begins to heave and crack as the new Age of Aquarius struggles to come into existence, the archetype of the Age is forming around Tarzan. Tarzan will emerge triumphant.
The next two scenes of Burroughs’ tapestry which come to life not unlike the pictures on the tattooed man are as vivid as any scenes Burroughs wrote. The agony of Gunner Patrick when he awakes to find himself alone is palpable. There is even an element of tragedy in his situation if one has sympathy for murderous criminals. Burroughs rather sneers that without his machine gun Patrick is a pathetic figure. But, while the machine gun represents advanced tochnology man’s prowess has always depended on his weapons, whether they be stones, spears and bows and arrows, an old harquebus or the machine gun or stealth bombers and self-guided blockbusters. The fellow with the latest model is always top gun on the block. Without his weapon he is naturally nothing. Even Tarzan would have been a dead man long before this without his father’s knife. What makes Gunner Patrick so reprehensible is that he uses his weapon for injustice rather than justice. Thus without his weapon he is subject to the same injustice he would inflict on others.
Still, he’s our criminal so we have to take his side. One would say he is less criminal than the men who stole Jezebel from him except that out there they live by a different lawless code. As Patrick would say: They ain’t no cops out there.
Law is a matter of the strongest; so Tarzan as the strongest and justest will reestablish Law and Order according to his terms. He acts as the judge and jury which some people with an opposing notion of Law might find offensive or even dangerous to their plans. How much of a coincidence then is it that in Tarzan’s New York Adventure he is stripped of his status as lawgiver and subsumed to a different legal code? No coincidence at all in my mind. The legal decision declaring Tarzan a criminal also showed who was strongest in Hollywood. In fact, in late 1941 and into ’42 Burroughs had been ousted from Hollywood himself, living in exile in Hawaii.
The Golden Girl, Jezebel, had been taken into custody by Capietro but Stabutch has eyes for her. The two men decide to play poker for her, best three out of five. Strange that an Italian and a Russian should be familiar with the quintessential American card game, but there you have it, they were.
Stabutch loses but calls Capietro a cheat.
This scene recalls ERB’s own loss when he and Emma were in transit in Parma, Idaho. While Emma waited upstairs ERB got cleaned of the couple’s last forty dollars in what may very well have been a crooked game. I haven’t played poker a lot but I’ve never been in a straight game, so as a stranger in Parma, the odds are that Burroughs’ game was crooked. He doesn’t say so, of course, but I’d be willing to bet he thought so. The memory was a horrendous one for ERB; it crops up frequently in the corpus. My memory of a Navy game is always with me. In fact, someone I hadn’t seen for forty years brought it up the first thing. These things are like the scar on Tarzan’s forehead.
Capietro and Stabutch fight, one out of one, that Stabutch wins. He then flees with Jezebel. the Gunner who has been gathering his wits above the scene sees the two ride out the gate. He follows in pursuit on foot.
Stabutch and Jezebel put up for the night during which a lion scares their horses away. Hungry the next day, Stabutch stashes the Golden Girl in a tree while he goes hunting. Staking out a water hole he is surprised to see Tarzan drinking. A golden opportunity to accomplish his mission but the strain is too much for his nerves; he misses his shot. Running as fast as he can, Tarzan following torments his victim with a couple of arrows before, as Stabutch begs for his life, putting an arrow through his throat. His throat! I was ready for ‘his black heart’ but was surprised by ‘his throat.’ As a probable surrogate for Stalin who sent him, why his throat? At any rate Tarzan has now completely defeated the Communists; once in Invincible and again here.
Patrick has been miraculously reunited with Jezebel but now all three are captured by the shiftas. The outcome is clear. The faithful Waziri stage a frontal attack on the shifta stockade. Patrick and Jezebel, who have been bound and left in the same tent, free themselves. The hard thing Patrick has been lying on turns out to be ‘his better half’, the machine gun. He then opens up on the shiftas from the rear. No contest.
b.
The final picture in the web then, is the successful bringing together of all the threads and strands which began two thousand years previously in an entirely unrelated event, when Paul was martyred in Rome and Angustus fled for the African hinterland bringing his slave girl with him.
Lord Passmore as it turns out is Tarzan in disguise. He assumed the identity so as not to arouse suspicion. So once again Tarzan displays an effeminate side. A disguise hardly seems necessary for the Big Bwana but as ERB needed the faithful Waziri for the big battle scene finale, perhaps so.
Tarzan at this point seems to be a solo act; there is no hint of Jane awaiting him back in Kenya. Lafe Smith and Lady Barbara are brought together. Thus the bright alter ego of Burroughs is paired up with a member of the English aristocracy who may represent the writer Dorothy Sayers, perhaps a match ERB would have liked in real life.
Already three or four years into his affair with Florence, of which surely Emma was aware, one wonders what she thought when she realized she had been written out of the story. Well, she did turn to drink.
More interestingly, Burroughs’ dark alter ego, Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick and the Golden Girl, Jezebel are brought together. He is going to leave Chicago taking Jezebel to somewhere in LA to buy a service station. A worthy ambition; for some reason the movie, The Postman Always Rings Twice, pops into my mind. The screenplay for that movie was written by Raymond Chandler who, for no explicable reason, I associate with Burroughs. There must be some similarity between Philip Marlowe and Tarzan. Marlowe did get sapped a lot. Chandler even turns sapping into an art form.
In pairing Jezebel/Florence off with his dark side ERB may be hinting at the direction his relationship with Florence will take. His life with her was certainly different than his life with Emma as he let his hair down and began dressing like quite a dandy, or, perhaps, Lord Passmore.
On that score, in this novel, Burroughs selects his dark side to take the obligatory bashing. One wonders then if he attributes this dark side to the bashing in Toronto. Is he saying that his dark side was the result of the bashing? Did he begin living some sort of double life some few years after he was laid out? Was his character even more erratic than it appears? How much did Emma put up with?
His emphasis on the notion that every man has two characters that may diverge as did Jekyll and Hyde give reason to think so. At any rate the following couple years ERB himself would be leading a double life. As Lafe Smith with Lady Barbara/Emma and as the desperado Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick with his amour Jezebel/Florence Gilbert Dearholt. Jezebel is certainly appropriately named.
The next two novels explain his own relationship to Florence and Emma. Leopard Men, which I have already reviewed, deals with his opting for Florence while City Of Gold deals with his rejection of Emma. But first some conclusions and organization.
To be concluded in Part 6: Threads and Stands Of The Web
A Review: Pt. 4 Tarzan Triumphant by Edgar Rice Burroughs
August 2, 2011
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#15 Tarzan Triumphant
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 4
The Born Again Lafe Smith
The time has come the Walrus said
to speak of many things;
Of shoes and ship and sealing wax
Of cabbages and kings.
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings.
Lewis Carrol
The learned nonsense of Lewis Carrol was never far from Burroughs’ mind. In the long list of influences Carroll ranks fairly high although more disguised than others. Both adventures of Alice as well as The Hunting Of The Snark formed the backbone of Burroughs’ ideology. Thus the entrance to the Land Of Midian in many ways resembles Alice’s descent into the rabbit hole. The sexual implications of the rabbit hole should be self-evident as is the the entry into the Land of Midian.
The Lafayette of Smith’s name refers of course to the revolutionary Marquis de Lafayette who fought against the monarchy in the American Revolution. Recently General Pershing had repaid the debt when, as he stepped ashore in France he grandly proclaimed: Lafayette, we are here. A famous utterance then and now so that it appears that Burroughs is associating freedom and liberation to his alter ego. He might exclaim as he stepped through the hole: I am Lafayette and I am here.
Smith is studying the geology of the area when he discovers a cleft in the mountain which he enters. In some ways Burroughs old life ended when the Reds invaded Opar. La was forced out into the the real world when her people rebelled because of La’s fixation on Tarzan. The Big Bwana restored her to her throne having destroyed the rebel chiefs. We are led to believe that La reigned happily ever after even though her manifestation as well as Opar disappear from ERB’s dream world. With the death of his old dream world ERB seeks to find another; one which other people cannot enter. Jungle Girl written shortly after this novel provided one such place in the ancient Khmer kingdoms of Cambodia and Thailand.
Thus Midian is a pale reflection of Opar. While the way to Opar was known to the world, indeed, Zveri, Stalin and the Communists as well as many Africans knew of the fabulous wealth of Opar and where the city was located. They didn’t know where the gold was located because in was in Burroughs’ mind.
Having had his dream world violated ERB creates another but this time the location is so remote and the entrance so difficult, although identical to that of Opar, to find that none but his Anima and Animus figures can find it.
Like the great red and gold city of Opar Midian is surrounded by high cliffs but unlike Opar they are unscalable from either side. No casual visitors are going to get in there. Like the actual city of Opar the only entry is through a cleft in the walls. In Opar once through the cleft one climbs a stairway to enter the ruins. Here, led by his interest in geology Smith enters the cleft in the mountain reft by titanic forces ages ago to follow it deep within the mountain wall. To insure that he continues on down the rabbit hole Burroughs sends a lion in after him blocking any exit should he wish to turn back. Thus the lion as Fate is forcing him to his destiny. The role of the lion in the oeuvre remains elusive to me; I fail to grasp the nuances as well as the essence. The lion may be another side of Tarzan, the Lion Man, who is helpful. On the other hand the lion as an expression of Burroughs’ Anima is extremely dangerous and hateful falling beneath Dad’s knife repeatedly, these are usually female. Still a problem for me.
Following the cleft for some way Smith reaches the end which is a very small hole that he can just force his way through. The symbolism of birth is quite clear; the descent from the womb and the breakthrough to the other side through the vagina.
Both aspects of Burroughs’ Anima are already inside Midian. Lady Barbara parachuted there while Jezebel was born there. Thus, it would seem that the La, Jezebel, Balza figure was native to Burroughs’ X chromosome while Jane, Lady Barbara, Rhonda Terry was an acquired image.
Smith will also be joined by the two remaining Animus figures, Gunner Patrick and Tarzan. All five of his Anima/Animus figures that he acknowledges were then functioning in his dream world. This may have represented his brain or the womb or a combination of both. What seems to be clear is that with the destruction and death of his old dream world he is being born again. The resurrection scene will follow.
When Tarzan enters Midian as when he is entering the cleft of Opar it is necessary for him to manipulate his shoulders through by turning them sideways. Thus there is a clear reference to birth.
Perhaps when Burroughs began self-publication he felt as though he were making a break with his past. Leaving McClurg’s and Joe Bray behind, making a new start as it were, he was beginning a new life. That was probably part of it as was the invasion of Opar by his enemies but I’m sure there is personal development involved that isn’t clear to me yet.
Once inside, convinced that the lion is following him although one believes the small hole would have baffled the lion, Smith finds the convenient tree in front of the hole into which he climbs for safety. Then Smith does exactly what Patrick, the dark side of the ego, will do, he goes down to the lake and gorges himself on water. This could be construed as baptism of the born again man; the living water of redemption.
He then meanders in the direction of Midian. As night has fallen the bonfires attract him.
By this time Lady Barbara after a few refreshing skinny dips waiting for her clothes to dry, Burroughs actually writes these strange interludes, finds her way back to Midian. For some strange reason the Midianites pay no attention to her mind boggling miracles, sometimes you can’t buy a thrill, choosing to disregard the apparent will of their god.
She and Jezebel are condemned to be crucified and burned to death. Both have been placed on the crosses with faggots piled round when Smith and his trusty nickel plated .32 burst upon the scene.
Now we have the resurrection of Smith and his Anima figures. The implication is that the trinity have symbolically died and are now resurrected. This is some fancy footwork.
Imagine the scene: Two crosses are erected. The Anima figures are placed on the crosses. As I imagine it there is a space of four to eight feet between the arms. Smith forces a way to a place in fornt of the crosses as he kicks away the burning faggots between the two crosses. Although not on a cross himself he is symbolically so he and Burroughs assume the role of Jesus Christ in the middle while the Anima figures represent the two thieves, one on either side.
Thus we are playing out a reenactment of the Christian crucifixion that will have a different result.
The Christians are pressing in on Smith. This is yet another version of Burroughs’ confrantation with John the Bully on the street corner. Back then he turned and ran. Now Smith is in a quandary. Christ in the same dilemma turned the other cheek saying: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.
We have all been taught to revere turning the other cheek. Some even attempt to practice the precept. I’m sure the ploy may work from time to time but in nine times out of ten it won’t. That is more or less the dilemma of the Western world today. it is steadfastly trying to turn the other cheek but every time it does a steel-toed boot gets planted on it.
Thus as Smith is dithering a clear cultured English female voice comes down from the cross saying: You’re going to have to shoot to kill, you know. In other words, turning the other cheek is sure death. Burroughs is especially good at surprise twists like this.
Astonished, perhaps thinking the angel of the Lord had spoken to him Smith complies, firing into the crowd. As the joke is that his aim is so poor he couldn’t hit the side of a barn he is fortunate enough to actually kill someone.
Momentarily stunned by the magical weapon but not overawed the crowd pauses long enough to allow Smith to get Lady Barbara down. Thus Burroughs chooses the older more stately aspect of his Anima rather than the Wild Thing, sex kitten. Perhaps as Florence was out of town ERB temporarily shifted bazck to the Jane Anima aspect. Within a matter of weeks or days he will decide on Jezebel/Balza/Florence when Florence unexpectedly returns and he writes Leopard Men in celebration.
Smith succeeds in lowering Lady Barbara but then Jobab challenges the efficacy of his .32. Smith fires at Jobab point blank missing him. Jobab vindicated rushes Smith knocking the gun out of his hand. Lady Barbara scoops it up, places the muzzle against Jobab’s side where he learns the efficacy of the Colt. Thus the Anima and Animus of Burroughs have now killed a man.
This give the crowd pause once again so that Jezebel is lowered and the Trinity run away. The two Anima aspects and Burroughs’ bright Animus are now whole. The confrontation with John the Bully has been resolved.
They attempt to find the opening but in the process wander into North Midian where they are captured by the fair haired, blue eyed, small nosed but no less superstitious North Midians. They manage to escape.
They capture a kid to eat but in the process the goatherd misses it. What the symbolism of eating the ‘lamb’ is escapes me just now. Smith and lady Barbara are recaptured, taken to the village.
In the meantime Tarzan and Patrick enter the crater. Burroughs now has all five of his Anima and Animus figures in the crater. Tarzan separates from Patrick. The latter comes across Jezebel who had escaped the North Midians. The meeting is apparently love at first sight so the Wild Thing Anima and the killer Animus are united. As they are tired they lay down together. You can draw your conclusions but Jezebel appears to be ready for any ‘beautiful’ man who comes along. Whether a comment on Floence isn’t clear however Burroughs in his mind would be seeing her in his Desperado aspect while she would be his Wild Thing or little Flapper girl.
Perhaps with Smith/Lady B ERB is representing his Dr. Jekyll side, his married status while with Jezebel/Patrick he is representing his Hyde side in his affair with Florence Gilbert.
Jezebel and Patrick leave the crater. On the outside they are spotted by Capietro’s men who bash the Burroughs surrogate on the head leaving him for dead while they carry Jezebel off. This would be the same situation with John the Bully or the bashing in Toronto however it may also represent Ashton Dearholt’s taking Florence out of town for a cooling off period.
Burroughs interjects a comedy routine back in North Midian with a lampoon of religosity over whether Paul had yellow hair or black hair. The upshot is that Smith is to die.
However a pair of eyes are watching the scene. An unknown lurker to the North Midians, Tarzan to us. Tarzan’s own role in this story is his battle with Capietro and Stabutch. Otherwise he functions as a deus ex machina– a God from the machine a common feature of Greek drama to resolve an otherwise unresolvable plot point — to get the Anima figure out of difficulty. He does in this case too.
Then leaving he crater Tarzan escorts the pair to his friend Lord Passmore’s safari leaving them there in safety with the faithful Waziri. Then he goes back to deal with Stabutch and Capietro.
Thus Fate and Burroughs go about weaving their web. The similarity to Penelope of the Odyssey is close with the exception that Burroughs does not unravel the previous day’s work. But one is invited to see this story as a series of pictures woven into the tapestry somewhat like the contest between Athene and Arachnae. One might also compare the novel, in the classical mode, to the Shield of Achilles which is decorated around the edge with a series of pictures portraying the life of the Bronze Age. So Burroughs has woven a series of such pictures into his tapestry. A clever idea and well executed. How many people have ever gotten it except for us is open to question.
So far Burroughs has insulted the Jews and ridiculed religion in general and Christianity specifically. He now turns to the strand of Communism, humiliating them in his dreamworld. It is all well that he should take the attack to them but one is surprised that he either didn’t anticipate a counter attack or didn’t anticipate the direction from which it would come if he was even yet aware that his defenses had been overrun by MGM.
The man was playing with fire without an awareness of real life consequences. It would be amusing to know if a copy of Tarzan Triumphant was rushed off to Stalin. One can be sure that the ADL/AJC/MGM combination had an advance copy perhaps even the chapters as they were being written. It is inconceivable that his enemies had no spy within his organization. That is just the way things are done and had to have been done in this instance. The usual mode is to capture the position of secretary through whom all information passes. That means that ERB’s typist may have been the conduit, Cyril Ralph Rothmund or perhaps even both. I’m betting on Rothmund for sure. I would love to see his finances. He may also have been on the ADL/AJC/MGM payroll was well as Burroughs’. Itr was he who negotiated the contract Burroughs signed giving away the control of Tarzan.
The next picture on the web is the reunion of Jezebel and Patrick followed by the battle of Tarzan and the Communists.
To be continued in Part 5: In The Footsteps Of The Lord
A Review: Pt. 3, Tarzan Triumphant by Edgar Rice Burroughs
August 1, 2011
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#15 Tarzan Triumphant
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 3:
Two Peas And The Pod.
The ease with which ERB shifts from one complicated subject to another is truly remarkable; no less so in the facility he has for organizing these matters into a few lines or paragraphs. No one can do this without a firm grasp of his subject matter. ERB is simply one of the best informed writers of his era.
In a little less than a page ERB summarizes the Torrio-Capone years in Chicago from the beginning of Prohibition in 1920 while incorporating a fictional history of his character, Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick. Patrick as his name indicates is Irish. He was part of the Dion O’ Bannion gang led bhy Bugs Moran after O’Bannion’s demise in 1924. According to Burroughs Patrick took part in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929.
…but Danny Patrick was ambitions. For years he had been the right hand of a Big Shot. He had seen his patron grow rich– “lousy rich” according to Danny’s notion– and he had become envious.
So Danny double crossed the Big Shot, went over to the other side, which, incidentally, boasted a bigger and better Big Shot, (Al Capone) and was a party to the hijacking of several truck loads of booze belonging to his former employer.
—————-
Many of the Big Shot’s enemies and several of his friends, had Danny taken for a ride. He knew the power of the Big Shot, and feared him. Danny did not want to go for a ride himself, but he knew that if he remained in dear old Chi he would go the way of all good gunmen much to soon to suit his plans.
Patrick is not not a nice guy, he is definitely not a nice guy. For my tastes ERB is much too tolerant of a man he describes as a psychopathic killer. “many of the Big Shot’s enemies, and several of his friends’ implies that Patrick has many, perhaps dozens, of murders to his credit yet Burroughs is going to have Tarzan befriend this guy.
While O’ Bannion was done in in 1924 by the Capone gang, being succeeded by Moran, ERB seems to telescope the years reversing things so that O’Banion is still alive after the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre– ‘The Day Chicago Died.’ ERB is clearly following and thinking about the situation in Chicago as he says, p. 27:
(Patrick) knew that sooner or later, the Big Shot woud have a grand funeral with truck loads of flowers and, at least, a ten thousand dollar casket.
Underworld funrals were prodigious affairs. There is a certain irony in the fact that Dion O’ Banion ran a flower shop. As a big crime figure it would be expected that the flowers for those expensive funerals would come from his shop. Is it any wonder Patrick was taking so many people for a ride. O’ Banion had a good racket going there.
Not wanting to be taken for a ride himself Patrick had opted for an extended vacation taking his typewriter with him. A Chicago typewriter, of course, was a Thompson machine gun. Tommy gun. The Chicago underworld qauickly adopted the Tommy gun which was new at the time. The Tommy made those Dick Tracy comic strips so thrilling. Although one has come to accept the Chicago hoodlum story as a commonplace if one actually thinks about it the open war between the underworld and legitamate society is so startling that one should be appalled. ERB like the rest of his contemporaries seems to have taken the fact in stride even, in his case, making Patrick a hero.
It is almost as though he made Patrick the dark side of the mild mannered Geology professor, Lafayette Smith. Or, in other words, himself. In this series of books from Invincible to Lion Man ERB explores the split or dual personality as examined in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. Convinced as ERB is that the Animus is represented by two archetypes, whith which I find no difficulty other than it can be three, four or more, in this story as usual he divides the two aspects of the personality between two characters. Although Lord Passmore who is Tarzan in disguise has a decidedly homosexual feel, which would make four personalities.
Lafe Smith is clearly an alter ego of Burroughs. Borrowing from ERB’s own experience he says of Smith, p. 11:
…Lafayette Smith, A.M., Ph.D., Sc.D, professor of geology at the Phil Sheridan Military Academy.
——————-
For a school year now, he had been an instructor in an inconspicuous western military academy.
Here we have ERB as he would like to have been with a string of degrees after his name. First in this dream life he is a professor of Geoplogy athe Phil Sheridan Military Academy which sounds pretty impressive but then he is mysteriously down graded from a professor to a mere instructor (which ERB was in fact) for a schoolyear, nine months, at an inconspicuous military academy. Thus fantasy collides with reality.
Another fantasy, now Smithe was on his way to achieve another cherished ambition, that of going to Africa to study the Great Rift Valley perhaps as ERB himself might have liked to have done but which he never did.
So ERB has his ego ideals, his Jekyll and Hyde sides going as pals to Africa. As Tarzan is also an ego ideal we have an actual trinity. Jekyll and Hyde and what? God? David Adams who is a pretty thorough Jungian is mystified by the lack of the benevolent old man in Burroughs’ work who according to Jungian theory should have been there. This is more htan likely a very involved question but I am going to sugest that possibly characters like Tarzan and John Carter seve in that capacity of Old Man/Jekyll figures while the actual Old Man figures who are betrayers serve perhaps as the Hydelike figures representing his father.
In real life Burroughs ‘old man’, his father, was a betrayer who had little good to say about his son even to the extent of defaming him to all and sundry. So, it is possible that ERB split the Jungian benevolent Old Man figure into Jekyll like Tarzan and John Carter and his father into the Hydelike Old Man character. As he was conflicted with a love/hate relationship with his father it would be easier for him not to mention his father by name. I offer this interpretation only as a suggestion and do not insist n it, still it is a possible solution to the problem perhaps leading to a full solution.
You can take the boy out of Chicago but you can’t take Chicago out of the boy. ERB was always fascinated by slang. Gunner Patrick gives him the opportunity for extensive and amusing word play. The criminal culture from which patrick comes has what amounts to a patois. At one point ERB calls it by the French term of argot. Even though he is pronouncing English words that the English speaking characters can recognize the meanings of the meaning he attaches to the words are beyond the comprehension of his auditors. Thus one has the intersting effect of the cultural clash between two examples of what should be the same culture but is not.
Of course ERB is in full command of not only both these cultures but seemingly all cultures. In his zany multi-cultural world he is the Master of Cultures. I pretend to the succession of ERB.
Thus disembarking from a ship the bright and dark sides of ERB tramp across Africa in the direction of the Great Rift Valley. Perhaps like Kitchener they came down the Nile to Khartoum and cut up the Blue Nile to Ethiopia like Samual Baker. Now Burroughs has to integrate his master alter ego, Tarzan, into the Jekyll and Hyde pair.
A psychological interpretation is that Tarzan must accept the Hyde of Burroughs’ personality as well as the Jekyll. Indeed, Tarzan seems to respect the Hyde side much more than he does the clown like but educated Jekyll side.
As the story is told Tarzan hears the sound of a machine gun and goes to investigate. Patrick had fired into the bush hoping to hit a lion nosing about the safari camp. He succeeds in temporarily scaring it away, giving Tarzan time to locate the camp.
The lion returns. Imagine this scene. Patrick with this Tommy gun is standing under the convenient tree, while Smith stands behind him with his nickel paltged .32 that he doesn’t even know how to aim. Here ERB’s dark side is in command while his incompetent but intelligent bright side is subordinate to the dark. What does this mean in real life?
As Patrick fires on the lion the Tommy gun jams leaving both sides of Burroughs’ alter-ego defenseless. At this time the Master alter ego falls on the lion from the tree killing him and saving the lives of the subordinate alter egos, Patrick and Smith. Patrick is Irish and the more aggressive while one presumes Smith is English and more passive. Thus a major theme of Irish and English which runs throughout the corus is here erepresented. While ERB claimed to be ‘pur’ English he was actually only English on his father’s side while Bennsylvania Dutch, in other words, Rhineland German, and Irish on his Mother’s side. the Irish surfaces not only here but in the following year when he assumed his Irish ancestral name of John McCulloch to write Pirate Blood. Also as David Adams points out the killing of the lion puts the seal on the relationship between Tarzan, Smth and Patrick.
In the same period of time he wrote Pirates Of Venus and Pirate Blood. Although pirates had figured in his early writing as the Black Pirates of Barsoom and the pirates of Pellucidar unless I’m mistaken this sudden efflorescence of interest in pirates has to do with the ‘pirating’ of Tarzan by MGM.
While not introducing himself Tarzan peremptorily gives the pair some instruction on how to comport themselves in the jungle then disappers up his tree.
The next time Tarzan and Patrick meet is a bonding session in which Tarzan accepts Burroughs’ dark side, Patrick.
Tarzan is squatting on the edge of the cliff observing Capietro and Stabutch in their camp below. the ground gives way precipitating Tarzan over the edge. He attempts to save himself by grabbing the chance tree growing out of the cliff face- the chance tree- even here Burroughs equates trees with safety- but the tree gives way. Tarzan falls through the grass roof of a hut landing safely. He is imediately engulfed by the goons of Capietro.
Now, having lunch under another tree not too far away, yards actually, is Gunner Patrick. HIs attention called to the Ape-man who he had previously not noticed he gets up to investigae. Aiding Tarzan he lets loose with a blast from the Thompson. He succeeds in dispersing the crowd as well as Capietro and Stabutch. this is almost commical: Tarzan shouts to Patraick to not go away, he’ll be right up. Good as his word he appears above.
Now come this very interesting bonding session in which Tarzan accepts Patrick. P. 98:
The “Gunner” was waiting for him upon the summit of the cliff directly behind the village, and for the second time these strangely dissimilar men met- dissimilar and yet, in some respects, alike. Each was ordinarily quiet to taciturnity, each was self-reliant, each was a law unto himself in his own environment; but there the similairty ceased for the extremes of environment had produced psychological extremes as remotely separated as the poles.
The ape-man had been reared amidst scenes of eternal beauty and grandeur, his associates the beasts of the jungle, savage perhaps, but devoid of coarse, petty jealousy, treachery, meanness and intentional cruelty; while the “Gunner” had known naught but the squalid aspects of scenery defiled by man, of horizons grotesque with the screaming atrocities of architecture, of an earth hidden by concrete ans asphaltum and littered with tin cans and garbage, his associeates in all walks of life activated by grand and petty meannesses unknown to any but mankind.
Now, Burroughs signed his contract with MGM on April tenth of 1931 while he didn’t finish Triumphant until May twentieth so had forty days in which to realize his mistake. If he did realize his error so quickly it might acount for some of the misanthropic bitterness in the above passage and elsewhere. Filching his character would certainly be considered a grand meanness. On the other hand his misanthropic interpretation was a continuation of his longstanding dislike of mankind and civilization.
It is of interest that both Patrick and Tarzaqn have killed many men. Some of Tarzan’s kills, quite frankly, verge on the psychopathic. I can’t get over how he literally ripped a man’s head off his shoulders in Ant Men. Of course, he may have merely underestimated his strength being a fourth his size but having his full sized strength.
Nevertheless both are laws unto themselves in their own domains so theoretically they do as they please. Still, and I don’t know how to interpret this, ‘the extremes of environment had produced psychological extremes as remotely separated as the poles.’ I’m clear on Patrick’s extreme but I’m not sure which extreme Tarzan represents.
These extremes were caused by the differences in the environments of the two men. Tarzan was raised amongst beauty , while Patrick was raised amongst squaor. As Burroughs roamed over Chicago, and it seems certain he searched out nooks and crannies, he was appalled byh the ‘screaming atrocities of architecture’. Chicagoans have been quite proud of their architects and architectures so Burroughs critique is quite different. The paving over of the environment bothered him as much as it does me. We no longer see the tin cans and bottles but the dumping of garbage wherever by certain people still goes on.
Tarzan was raised among the ‘noble’ beasts while Patrick was raised essentially among thieves and cheats.
Still, invironment aside both men had many kills or murders to their credit. Seems like a double standard to absolve Tarzan while condemning Patrik especially since each is obviously a product of their environment while neither therefore is inherently good regardless of their environment.
Perhaps Tarzan kills only for just reasons, of his own reckoning as he is a law unto himself, while patgrick kills for gain is where the difference lies. Perhaps that is the difference between constituted society and the criminal world. There are times when the most mild mannered and best of men and women must kill, whether in the individual or collective sensel. Burroughs brings this out when Lafe Smith attempts to liberate Lady Barbara and Jezebel from the Midianites. As he faces the Midianites with his .32 a cultured English voice comes down from the cross telling him that he is goint to have to kill someone if he and women wish to survive.
Perhaps this scene isn’t just entertainment but Burroughs relating a hard fact of life. No matter how good you may be a situation in life will appear when you will have to do that which goes against evrything you believe if you wish to survive.l Such is the West’s situation in the world today; commit suicide yourself or shoot to kill. Sometimes it comes down to that; left multi-culturalism or no.
This scene may be a very important psychological moment for ERB. There is wry truth in Tarzan’s next utterance to Patrick: “‘ A machine gun has its possibilites,’ the ape-man said with the flicker of a smile.'”
Perhaps ERB is in some midlife evaluation. The scene with his alter-ego Smith’s entry into Midian is laden with symbolism also. Let’s see how Burroughs handles that as he and Fate continue to weave the warp and woof of this remarkable tapestry to bring out the pattern.
Continued in Part 4: Lafe Smith, Born Again.
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
by
R.E. Prindle
ERB The Scholar
Part 2
Lady Barbara Drops In
As always ERB is the consummate multi-culturalist both ethnic and social. Barbara is the daughter of the English Lord Whimsey, Smith is a college professor, Capietro is an Italian Communist renegade, Stabutch is a Russian Communist, the Midianites represent an ancient religious culture derived from the Jewish, Tarzan is Tarzan of Africa and Lord Passmore of England and then we have a cast of animal characters including a tribe of baboons who interact with Tarzan on the cultural level. All are represented as being culturally distinct. ERB is more of a right multi-culturalist than a left.
If a culture is in fact a culture it must be distinct or it couldn’t qualify as a culture. To be of the French culture there must be characteristics that can be identified as specifically French. Else, why call yourself French? The Left multi-culturalists need to define their terms a little better. They come across as rather shabby intellectually.
Then, of the hundreds, probably thousands of cultures, are they all to be considered equal? For instance is it considered desirable to be of the Prison culture? Pedophile culture? No, of course not; not all cultures are equally beneficial. Each culture must be analyzed on its own merits and faults, completely analyzed by objective analysts. No particular culture need be nor can be taken at its own evaluation. Obviously many cultures are to be avoided completely. Others should be isolated or quarantined. Which is which can only be determined by an analysis of its positive contributions. The results of analysis can be unkind; the truth frequently hurts. As the French say: C’est la vie.
In his analysis of group cultures ERB does draw conclusions. There’s no doubt he thinks that the Communist culture is a negative to be avoided. Thus Zveri in Invincible was ignominiously defeated by Tarzan as Stabutch will be in Triumphant.
In almost every case ERB is very hard on religious cultures as he will be in this novel. Is he unjust or is the truth about religion just too hard for devotees to bear? Everyone will have their own opinion while I have made my position abundantly clear: the religious consciousness is outdated, having been surpassed by the vastly superior Scientific Consciousness. I won’t be changing my mind soon.
Lady Barbara Collis is about to parachute into a culture two thousand years in the past. ERB commits a major gaffe here in the opening pages of his novel. Lady Barbara is attempting a non-stop flight of 7500 miles in a 1930 plane, clearly impossible. Rather than taking a direct route up the Nile she is lost several hundreds of miles to the East over Ethiopia and, get this, already running on empty.
Dorothy Sayers
I don’t know who calculated her fuel needs but I should imagine he would be looking for a new occupation. But, that doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the story any more than the donut atmosphere of Poloda in Beyond The Farthest Star. Who knows what goes on beyond the farthest star. They probably even suspend the laws of gravity.
There Lady Barbara is, way up there without the means of propulsion. she does the manly thing: she jumps out. This is real Twilight Zone stuff; little does she know she will leave the twentieth century and land in 80 AD or so. The Land Of Midian has been frozen in time for the last two millennia.
The Midians assembled within the walls of their crater hear the drone of the airplane, which sound they are unable to identify and then to their amazed eyes a little white cloud appears through the mist with a human form dangling below it. To their religiously distorted senses it must be the Angel of the Lord.
Thus we have a nice confrontation between two different cultures. The modern scientific of Lady Barbara and the ancient religious culture of the Midians. The Midians could stand as a metaphor of the religions of Burroughs’ day which, not unlike the Midians, were roooted in a culture two thousand years old and of a different and inferior consciousness. Not only had the Scopes trial recently ended but the sensatinal affair of Aimee Semple Mcpherson was still fairly warm, plus ERB had recently read Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry. That novel did not sit well with ERB nor does it sit well with me. Burt Lancaster’s movie Elmer Gantry, by the way, is totally dissimilar to the Gantry of the book.
According to ERBzine Burroughs took offence at Elmer Gantry, deploring Lewis’ habit of ridiculing
Aimee Semple Mcpherson
and demeaning people rather than presenting the story as entertainment. Lewis does ridicule and belittle every character in his book in a detestable holier than thou manner which is very annoying. Burroughs turns the story around and disparages practices which I suppose makes it entertainment. For instance both the fictional Gantry and the real life Mcpherson are what are known in military slang as ‘Sky Pilots.’ Thus there is a certain amount of humor in Lady Barbara as an angel of the lord sky piloting into the religious Land of Midian.
When the Midianites drown a young woman while dragooning her, Lady Barbara, after the manner of Mcpherson, brings her back to life by ‘a laying on of hands’, that is artificial respiration. Clever of ERB. It will be remembered tha Mcpherson had a roomful of crutches and wheelchairs from people she had supposedly cured by a laying on of hands. I have no idea how many readers might have gotten the joke when the novel was released but there the joke is if you care to look for it.
So we have the Scopes Trial, Aimee Semple Mcpherson and Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry all rolled up in a series of jokes ‘highly fictionized.’ There is probably more to be found if one could steep
Sinclair Lewis
oneself in the ephemeral culture of the time.
As mentioned, Lady Barbara parachutes through two thousand years of time to find herself among a Pauline Christian sect that hadn’t changed one iota since c. 80 A.D. The emphais on Pauline Christianity is important. At about this time ERB was becoming involved with the Vedantist mission in Hollywood so discussions of early Christianity may possibly have made an impression on him. Paul was, of course, a Jew who adapted the Jewish Christian sect for dissemination among the Gentiles. The Catholic Church was founded on Sts. Peter and Paul while the medieval Knights Templar based their Christianity on the Gospel of John thus being Johannites. There was a cultural divide between the Church and the Templars which did necessitate action no less than between the Paulites and the Arians. ERB’s emphasis is intended to indicate the Jewish origins of the Midianites.
It will be remembered that Angustus was a Jewish Christian who arrived in company with a Nordic slave girl. So for two thousand years the Midianites have been inbreeding. ERB is considering the results of inbreeding, as a year later he will write Pirate Blood that deals with the famously inbred Jukes family. Pirate Blood is perhaps his most despairing story as his mind tips toward Lamarckian evolution in an apparent attempt to explain to himself why he can’t resolve his psychological problems.
Thus the genetic and Lamarckian traits of Angustus and the slave girl have been passed down through approximately seventy generations. Angustus’ genes have predominated while those of the slave girl appear occasionally in sports.
Angustus was characterized by a huge nose that was an actual deformity, a chinless face and epilepsy. Thus if one imagines this, Lady Barbara is confronted by a group of people with huge noses covering most of their faces with no chins, the throat sweeping back from just under the lips and writhing on the ground in epileptic fits.
There can be no mistaking that ERB is caricaturing the Jews. Angustus was a Jew and he was a Pauline Christian. As a Christian, ERB disguises his Jewish nationality. The leader of hte Midianites, Abraham the son of Abraham certainly puts the Midianites into a Jewish context, as does the fact that they consider themselves the ‘chosen people.’ Ludicrous enough from their physical description.
ERB’s caricature is one that was prevalent when he was a young man, while one that couldn’t be missed by the gentlemen of the ADL/AJC and MGM. They would neither forgive nor forget. In fact Tarzan would be potrayed in The New Adventures Of Tarzan as chinless and with a huge nose. While Herman Brix/Bruce Bennet had neither a bulbous nose nor was chinless the effect was achieved through photographic lighting and shadowing. Either that or the film has deteriorated through time to achieve that effect. (DVD, The New Adventures Of Tarzan, Alpha Home Entertainment, www.oldies.com )
If you think there isn’t a war going on here, look more closely.
Even though of Jewish descent, the Midianites are Christians, but of the most primitive stripe; they make sects like the Nazarenes look liberal. Their minds are uncompromisingly dark. The girl who was dragooned was sentenced to death for smiling. Joy was considered of the devil in Midian. Here ERB characterized a number of Christian sects correctly.
Among the people who greeted Lady Barbara was a genetic sport who harked back physically and mentally to the original slave girl. She is Jezebel. She and Lady Barbara are immediately attracted to each other by their beauty. The attractive and intelligent Midianites were invariably fair haired and blue eyed while the unattractive ones were dark haired, brown eyed and stupid. Little doubt that the AJC/ADL would consider the book ‘racist.’
Jezebel is an interesting character in that she is a little more than light headed. She is governed entirely by surface appearances. As in Lion Man where the hybrids were expelled from Henry’s village, so the more attractive males were exiled to the other side of the crater. Obviously we have an example of eugenics here. They were more warlike than the Midianites occasionally raiding them. Jezebel remarks that they are so good looking she hopes they will capture her. When the Midianites honor ‘the angel’ with her own cave and offering of food, Jezebel is depicted laying back eating grapes like a spoiled young thing with a box of bon-bons. ERB later describes her as a Golden Girl which relates her to Balza of Lion Man and hence to Florence.
Whatever ERB tells himself about Florence in his conscious mind his depiction of her in his unconscious life seems to be quite different.
At first Lady Barbara is treated quite well but familiarity breeds contempt. Abraham Ben Abraham begins to suspect her divinity. Even the miracle of the laying on of hands that restored the girl to life being no less a miracle than the raising of Lazarus cannot dissuade Abe Ben Abe from testing Lady Barbara. Thus she too is dragooned but instead of being dunked three times she is thrown into the lake wrapped in a net with the net weighted. Here is proof positive that ERB read Dumas’ The Count Of Monte Cristo. The scene replicated Dantes being thrown into the sea from the Chateau d’If.
Lady Barbara has her handy jackknife so that she is able to cut her way free. Thus we leave her here crawling gaspingly ashore while we check in on Lafayette Smith and Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick.
The Big Bwana
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#15 Tarzan Triumphant
by
R.E. Prindle
Preface
Over many years I have searched for the point where myth and science join. It was clear to me for a long time that the origins of science had their deep roots in a particular myth, that of invariance. The Greeks as early as the 7th century B.C. spoke of the quest of their first sages as the problem of the One and the Many, sometimes describing the wild fecundity of nature as the way in which the Many could be educed from the One, sometimes seeing the Many as the unsubstantial variations being played on the One. The oracular sayings of Heraclitus the Obscure do nothing but illustrate with shimmering paradoxes the illusory quality of “things” in flux as they were wrung from the central intuition of society.
Before him Anaximander had announced also oracularly, that the cause of things being born and perishing is their injustice to each other in the order of time, “as they meet,” he said, for they are bound to atone forever for their mutual injustices. This was enough to make of Anaximander the acknowledged father of physical science, for the accent is on the “Many.” But it was true science after a fashion.
Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigaing The Origins Of Human
Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth, p. viii,
Giorgio de Santillana, 1969
Giorgio de Santillana
1.
The five Tarzan novels from Invincible to Lion Man form a unique quintet within the oeuvre. Together they are just shy of twenty-five percent of the twenty-one Tarzan novels published during Burroughs’ lifetime. If one excludes the late and unrelated Foreign Legion they are a fourth of the series. Twenty-five percent within four years. One might well ask what was going on in Burroughs’ life during these momentous four years.
With the possible exception of City Of Gold all the novels deal openly with recognizable current events. Invincible deals with the Soviet Communist menace which is continued as one of the themes of Triumphant. The mainspring of Triumphant is Cecil Rhodes’ old dream of a Cape to Cairo route. In this instance realized, as improbable as it might have seemed to Rhodes, as an air route. The hope of the air route was first explored in 1918 and was about to be realized shortly after Burroughs wrote this book.
ERB also throws in a bit about Chicago hoodlumism with a tip of the hat to Al Capone.
Tarzan And The Leopard Men deals with the African Leopard Cult that was in the news at the time. City of Gold is about ERB’s marital problems while Tarzan And The Lion Man concerns the recent and sensational MGM expedition to Africa to film Trader Horn. Both before and after these novels Burroughs wrote pure, well, almost pure fantasy.
The reason for the change isn’t clear; however, the thirties mark another change in novelistic styles so Burroughs may have been adapting to new circumstances. If so it was the third stylistic change he was successfully meeting although it would be his last. He had melded a turn-of-the-century style of the teens when he began writing, then adapting his style to that of the Jazz Age of the twenties. After a good start in the thirties the ground slipped from beneath his feet with his style becoming somewhat dated. By the forties he was finished although Foreign Legion makes a game shot at a stylistic evolution.
Perhaps more importantly, ERB changed because he wanted to be taken as a serious writer. He was simply tired of being known as an ignorant boob writing from the seat of his pants. For all the seeming frivolity of his fantasy themes they are based on very solid scientific and knowledgeable themes. They are imbued with an intense mythological acumen, while presenting a new mythology for the current age. They do deal with classical themes such as the One and the Many. Burroughs tried to organize experience into a new mthological structure which was desperately needed then and no less today.
2.
Consider Giorgio de Santillana again:
Today’s children, that impassive posterity to whom all reverence is due, know where to look for myths, in animal life in the Jungle Books. In the stories of Lassie and Flipper, where innocence is unassailable, in Western adventures arranged by grown ups for the protection of law and order. Much of the rest sedulously built up by mass media is modern prejudice and delusion, like the glamour of royalty, or the perfection of super detergents and cosmetics; super-stitio, leftovers. So one might be tempted to say. Actually however, no particle of myth is left over, and we have to do only with a deliberate lie about the human condition. Tolkien’s efforts at reviving the genre, whatever talent employed, carry as much conviction as the traditional three dollar bill.
Quite right. Burroughs had the handle on true mythology while being able to create the governing myth of the Aquarian Age. Triumphant is laden with myth. In truth Burroughs is not the light-headed, simple-minded writer that even his most devoted fans and admirers want to think him. He doesn’t want to parade his knowledge or get involved in abstruse discussions; he is writing seeming pure action novels, The Master Of Adventure, as his fans like to say, for a pulp magazine audience that primarily wanted to be thrilled. One may criticize Burroughs for it but he is never short on thrills or spectacular effects. One may guffaw at some of his heroes’ exploits as I surely do but your eyes are still popping. There’s a lot more under the seeming simplicity. Much of it would have been recognized at the time giving the ‘knowing’ reader the satisfaction of being in on what ERB was really talking about but as the topicality faded away the succeeding generations of readers could see only the action.
The first sentence of the preceding novel, Invincible, explains ERB’s approach:
I am no historian or chronicler of facts, and furthermore, I hold a very definite conviction that there are certain subjects which fiction writers should leave alone, foremost of which are politics and religion. However, it seems to me not unethical to pirate an idea occasionally from one or the other, provided that the subject be handled in such a way as to impart a definite impression of fictionizing.
In this series of five novels in a bid to be taken seriously, perhaps rather than conceal his knowledge by a ‘definite impression of fictionizing’ he was making a bid for intellectual recognition by ‘exposing’ his serious interests to some extent.
The background of Triumphant is solidly based historically and in current events. ERB was always seriously interested in aviation. Indeed, his life as an adult would span the first lift off at Kitty Hawk to supersonic jet flight over a period of a mere forty years. That might do something to your mind. the concept of speed changed in his lifetime from Barney ‘A mile a minute’ Oldfield to a fifteen mile a minute jet fighter plane.
Commercial flight as we know it today was non-existent in 1930. The DC3 was still five years distant. A flight from Cairo to Capetown involved several layovers and even train trips if air connections were not established between certain points. Yet, such a route was a major advance while being exciting news. Ya gotta remember making a crystal radio set at home was still a substantial achievement marking one as an electrical wizard. At the same time television was on the horizon, nearly a reality. In such a flight Burroughs had a sure fire topic.
He combines elements of an earlier 1918 attempt and the establishment of an air route at the time of writing. In 1918 shortly after the War ended the British got right on realizing the hope of a Cape to Cairo dream. Great Britain had acquired the German African colonies as part of the Versailles Treaty so that they were then in control of a continguous corridor through East Africa. The acquisition of Tanganyika (Tanzania) filled the gap.
3.
Four separate pilots set out from Cairo for the Cape. The attempt was not entirely successful, but by 1932 it was. Burroughs then selects as his imaginary pilot Lady Barbara Collis, an English aviatrix on a solo flight. she seems to be somewhat off her course flying over Ethiopia but then that might be expected.
The way Burroughs’ mind worked he usually has real models for these roles if you can figure them out. In this case I think Lady Barbara incorporates three different women. The only significan aviatrix I can locate is Amelia Earhart. She became in 1928 the first woman to fly the Atlantic. She was part of a three-man crew but gained notoriety. In 1930-31 she was preparing for a solo Atlantic flight a la Charles Lindbergh from Labrador to Paris. She did cross the Atlantic but was forced down in an Irish cow pasture not reaching Paris. That was after the book was written so ERB would be relying on her 1928 flight and preparations for the solo flight.
A second personality conflated with Lady Barbara may have been the famous evangelist and founder of the Four Square Church, Aimee Semple McPherson. I have a framed picture of McPherson in my collection. Evangelism may also have been on Burroughs’ mind from his recent reading of Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis. According to ERBzine Burroughs objected to Lewis’ forcing his atheism on the reader. Here one of his purposes may have been to show Lewis how it’s done.
Aimee Semple McPherson hit LA at about the same time as Burroughs.
By 1923 she was so popular she opened her 5000 seat Angelus Temple while beginning to broadcast over KSFG-K Four Square Gospel. And then a the height of her fame on May 18, 1926 she vanished after swimming in the Pacific. This and the following events during which several people died created a sensation no one in the country, and certainly LA, could miss. Not an ERB who was passionately interested in religion anyway. One wonders if he visited the Angelus Temple for Sunday services.
Aimee turned up in Mexico where she said she had been held captive after being abducted. But, apparently the pressures of success had been too much for her and she attempted escape into sex and a love tryst, which is a normal psychological reaction to unbearable stress as ERB himself was discovering. The disappearance and subseqauent events had continued into 1927 and 1928 so that ERB’s capacious mind was filled with the wonder of it all. Thus Lady Barbara disappears during the flight onto the mystery escarpment to reappear months later on the arm of Lafayette Smith. Same story. I think it likely ERB was thinking of both women while a third influence is almost certainly Dorothy Sayers, the mystery writer and creator of Lord Peter Whimsey. Burroughs hits at it by mentioning that the story does not concern Lord Wimsey but does concern his daughter, Barbara Collis. This probably refers to Dorothy Sayers and her creation, Peter Wimsey. When ERB admired a writer he wrote them into the story somehow. He was generous that way.
And then there is Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick of the Chicago Underworld. His name indicates he is Irish so he may be supposed to be associated with Dion O’ Bannion’s gang rather than Capone and the incipient Outfit. ERB privides an intriguing if overly sympathetic portrait of the gangster. One wonders if he had met models at this time.
In connection with Patrick, which begins an interest in organized crime that extends through Swords Of Mars and the its Guild of Assassins, Murder Inc. was established at this time so that by the date of 1933 it would seem that ERB brought Murder Inc. into the corpus.
Then there is LaFayette Smith himself. Named after General Lafayette of Revolutionary War fame and recently brought to mind by General Patton who said, as he stepped foot on French soil, ‘Lafayette, we are here.’ The young geology professor may be be taken as an alter ego of Burroughs himself as he taught geology at the MMA. Sort of the man Burroughs might have been had he the self-discipline to have gone to college. ERB apparently sincerely regretted he had not gotten a degree as a number of his alter egos are college graduates, such as the Old Timer of Leopard Men who graduated from his brothers’ alma mater, Yale.
4.
As noted Burroughs had taught geology as an instructor at the Michigan Military Academy. He was still following the subject closely as he grouses that geologists had as many opinions each about as accurate as the weather forecasters. Still, knowledge was developing at a break neck pace that would lead to our substantailly complete knowledge of today. It’s too bad that ERB couldn’t have held on to 1965 or so. A man of his intellect would have seen things.
Burroughs not only combines all these threads and strands but in his prologue he reaches for his most daring concept yet. It’s only a page so let’s look at it closely. The opening sentences:
Time is a warp of the tapestry which is life. It is eternal, constant, unchanging. But the woof is gathered from the four corners of the earth and the twenty-eight seas and out of the air and the minds of men by that master artist, Fate, as she weaves the design that is never finished.
A thread here, a thread from there, another from out of the past that has waited years for the companion thread without which the picture must be incomplete.
But Fate is patient. She waits a hundred or a thousand years to bring together two strands of thread whose union is essential to the fabrication of her tapestry, to the composition of the design that was without beginning and is without end.
That attitude informs all of Burroughs’ work; a study of the One and Many, and is the reason I am such an admirer. Given Burroughs Classical background that apparently made such a profound impression on him one is reminded of Penelope at her web as well as the three Greek mythological Fates themselves- the three daughters of Night– Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos.
Clotho the spinner, Lachesis the apportioner, Atropos who cuts the string that ends the web and life.
And then Burroughs begins to indicate how events occurring thousands of years previously would provide the strands of time to bring his story together into a recognizable pattern, the warp of the web, while th woof is the improbable bringing together of such disparate persons as Tarzan, Gunner Patrick, Lafe Smith, Lady Barbara and Jezebel, ERB’s prophetically named first Golden Girl. Florence is into the picture.
The ancient protagonist is a disciple of Paul of Tarsus, Angustus of Israel. At the death of Paul in Rome the paranoid Angustus decides to flee into the Heart of Darkness, Africa. Along the way he picks up a Nordic slave girl who will bring in ERB’s evolutionary theme. Then up the Nile into the Heart of Darkness.
In this story, all roads lead to Midian in the crater of an extinct Ethiopian volcano. In his way ERB who speaks frequently of coincidence denies the concept in favor of Fate the Inexorable. As Freud would say, there is no coincidence– one thing leads to another. Once set in motion the ball may be deflected but it cannot be stopped except by the cessation of Time– the non-existent but all controlling element.
Part two follows.
Edgar Rice Burroughs As A Feral Child
July 18, 2011
Edgar Rice Burroughs As A Feral Child
by
R.E. Prindle
Cronus:
Cronus married his sister Rhea, to whom the oak is sacred, But it was prophesized by Mother Earth and by his dying father Uranus, that one of his own sons would dethrone him. Every year, therefore, he swallowed the children whom Rhea bore him, first Hestia, then Demeter and Hera, then Hades, then Poseidon~ Robert Graves, The Greek Myths
I. The Father As A Cannibal Figure
Following Poseidon came Zeus. In place of Zeus Cronus was given a stone which he swallowed instead. When Zeus grew up he then castrated Cronus, replacing him.
While on the one hand an astrological myth denoting the precession of the equinoxes from one Astrological Age to another, on a psychological level the myth relates the fear of the Father that as the strength of his sons waxes his own wanes resulting in an eclipse.
Different human fathers react in different ways. Some nurture, some castrate or cannibalize their young. This is a serious problem for the son. For instance, what Tom Brokaw, a thoroughly castrated son, is pleased to call The Greatest Generation who were so enamored of their success in WW II, that they chose to emasculate a whole generation rather than surrender or even share power.
I correspond with David Adams from time to time while doing my writing from whom I sometimes receive valuable input. I had come to the conclusion that ERB’s father, George T, was a problem for ERB, especially as represented by ‘God’ in Tarzan And The Lion Man. The new year opened with Hillman publishing Dodds’ feral child collection which clicked in my mind. The week before ERBzine published my Part III, Two Peas And A Pod of the Tarzan Triumphant review. David Adams commented favorably on my comments about the Jungian Old Man archetype. He said in an email to me:
I agree with your interpretation that “characters like Tarzan and John Carter serve in the capacity of Old Man/Jekyll figures while the actual Old Man figures who are betrayers serve perhaps as Hydelike figures as represented by the father.” (David quoting me.) Those old man figures, early and late, are also cannibals who are hell-bent on eating him up while then spreading the bones across some desert for the hyenas to chew. Who was that old cannibal with the cancerous face followed by a pair of African wolves? (Jungle Tales of Kipling)
As can be seen I picked up on the Father figure but adding the cannibal detail adds the needed dimension for full comprehension.
George T. had been bothering me for some time. The love-hate relationship ERB had with him is quite obvious, but then it occurred to me that the other sons had the same relationship to their father while George T. appeared to program them all for failure- that is they not surpass him in their lifetime somewhat like Cronus of Greek mythology. He made them all dependent on him. The supplicating tone of the letters from college of sons George and Harry is all too obvious. George T. sending the boys to Yale without the means to support a position would have had the effect of emasculating them relative to their fellow students thus subordinating them.
Then on graduation he took them into his battery business. As a businessman in Chicago it wouldn’t be unreasonable to believe that George T. had some relatively influential contacts in town who might have been able to place Yale graduates advantageously but he chose to keep the boys with him and subordinate to him.
The battery factory proved dangerous for his son Harry who developed respiratory problems from the battery chemicals plus perhaps in psychological reaction to suppression by his father. He went West to join fellow Yalie, Lew Sweetser, in Idaho. Son George, who had had enough of working for his father, also fled to Idaho to join Harry and Sweetser.
None of the three knew enough about the cattle business to survive so that by 1913 when George T. had his basket pulled up all the sons were back in Chicago in various degrees of failure or, at least, lack of success. As of that date it would appear that like Cronus George T. had swallowed or cannibalized his sons.
There was a Zeus figure in the bunch who didn’t want to be swallowed and that Zeus figure was ERB. Like Zeus ERB was the youngest son. ERB developed independently of his brothers who were approximately ten years older than he. Thus when they were at Yale ERB was attending grade school.
As I pointed out in my Books, Burroughs and Religion George T. was especially rigorous in the attempt to emasculate his youngest son. His effort culminated when he sent ERB to military school. This was a form of dislocation and rejection that ERB could not bear. He tried to escape but his father sternly returned him to the Michigan Military Academy.
The effects of this were that ERB was declassed as he considered the MMA a rich kid’s reform school. Thus to some extent he was criminalized in his own mind. His reaction was also seminal in the formation of his two principal characters John Carter and Tarzan.
His hurt was so strong, his separation from his parents and home so complete that he became psychologically orphaned. His parents died to him the day he was returned to the MMA. He adopted the drunken Commandant, Charles King, as his mentor or surrogate father. While betrayed by his father ERB apparently thought he found a friend in King. In that capacity King became the model for Lt. Paul D’Arnot of the French Navy. D’Arnot was the man who tamed the feral boy that was Tarzan introducing him to civilization much as King taught Burroughs how to survive and prosper at MMA. Or Burroughs remembered it in that manner. There may also be a literary connection to D’Artagnan of Dumas’ Three Musketeers.
This makes the period between the arrival of Jane and her party and the arrival of D’Arnot in Tarzan Of The Apes of special interest. I’m not sure what the period represents in Burroughs’ own life.
As his creation Tarzan is a feral child it follows that ERB considered himself alone and on his own as a feral child himself. A romantic notion but one no less real to him. Thus just as Tarzan’s parent’s died with the baby becoming a member of an ape tribe so Burroughs began a wild and difficult period as his parents died for him.
These events occurred just as Rider Haggard was becoming famous for his great African trilogy of King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain which ERB undoubtedly read at this time. Conan Doyle began his Sherlock Holmes mysteries and H.M. Stanley disappeared into an unknown Congo in pursuit of Emin Pasha. The West to East transit of the Congo impressed ERB greatly as his own heroes later crossed Africa in the same direction.
Being a complex individual ERB no longer wished to even acknowledge that he had ever had parents; thus his first creation- John Carter. As Carter only came into existence when ERB was 36 the writer had plenty of time to knock around learning the odd legend here and there. John Carter then is a version of the Great Historical Bum- the hundred thousand year old man of folklore.
John Carter could not remember his parents. In his memory he had always been the same age he was. In the words of one of my famorite songs, Stewball, he didn’t say he was born at all, just blew down in a storm. Certainly Burroughs had heard of the Comte de St. Germain who flourished at the time of the French Revolution. As esoterical cult figure today, St. Germain’s legend would have been more prominent from 1875 to 1911 than today. Like Carter St. Germain claimed to have been alive forever. In Revolutionary Europe he got away with it. Calgiostro was another Revolutionary charlatan claiming mysterious antecedents who would have intrigued ERB’s imagination. It seems certain the two would have been topics of conversation in the time before radio, TV and movies so it wouldn’t have been necessary for ERB to have read anything.
I doubt if he had read any of the books on Dodds’ list although one never knows but the list goes to show that the feral child would have been a popular topic of conversation. In my opinion then ERB’s literary future was cast when his cannibal father returned him to MMA.
He graduated from the MMA in ’95 but either couldn’t or wouldn’t return home staying on as an instructor. In ’96, just before the summer break which might have necessitated a return home he joined the Army being sent directly to Arizona without passing through Chicago. Was he avoiding returning home? One can’t say as in ’97 having found Army life not to his liking he received an early discharge. He could have kept going, of course, as many of us in his boots did, to LA, San Francisco or wherever but he chose at that time to return to Chicago. Of course, Emma was calling.
From ’97 to ’03 or so he worked for his father which he found as difficult as his brothers had. Fleeing Chicago to Idaho in 1903, when he came back a year and a few months later to do anything (that word anything has some meaning in this context) rather than work with his father. He became one of the poet Robert Service’s ‘men who don’t fit in.’ He had a very difficult few years from 1905 to 1913 bumping along the bottom.
But then in 1911 he began his rise via his intellect. He began to write becoming an immediate literary success of sorts. By 1913 when he was about to become a financial success through his intellectual efforts thus escaping his father’s curse, his father died. The young Zeus thus never got to castrate his father Cronus.
One can’t know what would have happened to his psychology had ERB been able to present his father with evidence of his success. I’m reasonably certain George T. would have belittled or rejected his success as like Cronus his youngest would have replaced him. He wouldn’t have liked that.
II. A Hand From The Grave
Had that happened and ERB been able to prove himself a greater than his father it is interesting to speculate as to what effect that might have had on ERB’s psychological development. As it was, a few months after his father’s death he packed up family and belongings and got out of town as far as he could go to San Diego, California and stayed away nine months. Time enough to be reborn.
There are numerous examples of betrayers who are cannibals in his corpus, in fact there is so much betraying and cannibalism in Burroughs’ work I find it slightly offensive. Rather than work up a list, which for the time being I leave to David, I’d rather concentrate on the most spectacular cannibalistic betrayer of the oeuvre, God of Lion Man.
I know I just wrote about Lion Man but with David’s interpretation of cannibalism I can present a much more cogent image. David’s much more into Jungian synchronicity than I am but the scene with God presents a remarkable occurrence of synchronicity. The scene is very complex.
George T. was born in 1833 so the book was written on his 100th birthday. Chicago was incorporated in 1833 while it was celebrating its Century Of Progress forty years after the Columbian Expo at the same time. Both events occurred just at the time that Burroughs realized he had lost control of his ‘meal ticket’ to MGM.
MGM was undoubtedly a component of God, the Father, being combined with the Chicago that fathered him and George T., his actual father, in his mind. From these components ERB then creates the magnificent apparition of God as man and beast. God has the mind of divine power such as had Zeus but is still a Cronus, is, in fact, the ultimate cannibal.
Tarzan and Rhonda represent Burroughs’ Anima and Animus so that God has the whole man in his power in its component parts- the X and y chromosomes. God tells the pair that he is going to use them to rejuvenate himself by cannibalizing them. The Father’s desire and the Son’s fear.
If God represents George T. on one side, MGM on another and organized religion on a third then even though ERB thought he escaped his father in 1913 by his intellectual efforts the father reaches up from the grave on his 100th anniversay to claim his son again.
At this time Burroughs also wrote Pirates Of Venus and Pirate Blood. Both would refer to the idea that MGM pirated his creation from him while the very despondent Pirate Blood is almost terrifying in its manic depression as the balloon rises and sinks being almost submerged in the ocean or the waters of oblivion, the subconscious mind, insanity, that I believe we can see it as the insanity of despair. At the end of that story the hero pairs up with a desperate woman who I believe we can read as Florence. All very transparent really.
So there Tarzan/Rhonda/Burroughs is trapped in a prison. He attempts his earlier escape of rising through his intellectual powers, that is, he ascends through a shaft in the roof. Unlike the first time when he surprised and astonished the world with John Carter and Tarzan, God, the Father, is waiting for him preventing his use of his intellect. In point of fact Tarzan And The Lion Man was a dismal sales failure thought by Burroughs to be caused by MGM.
If his previous four previous Tarzans under the Burroughs imprint had been successes it seems strange that the truly excellent Tarzan And The Lion Man should have failed. Failing proof of sabotage on the part of, say, MGM, one can only say the public taste is fickle or perhaps the innovative dust jacket didn’t look like the usual Tarzan dust jacket and fans just passed it by. It is also true that the book was a put down of MGM.
Tarzan/Burroughs sallies forth from his hiding place against superior forces. He is knocked unconscious. A sure sign that Burroughs is under supreme stress. Meanwhile God’s castle, in other words the literary structure of the last twenty years is going up in flames. The MGM pirates have lifted ERB’s life work.
He has to finish the story so he turns the tables on God taking him captive and making him do his bidding. Tarzan helps God recapture his City then abandons him disappearing down the hole of the subconscious to a lower level from when he emerges to be claimed by the Wild Thing- Balza, the Golden Girl, or Florence.
In a thinly disguised scene Tarzan, unwittingly it seems, wins Balza from her former husband much as Burroughs took Florence from Ashton Dearholt. The important thing here is that a transition has been effected from one world to another. The intellectual City of God has been abandoned in favor of a world of the senses.
It is at this point ERB abandons his own feral boy persona of horses, puttees and other symbols to become a sort of effeminate Dandy. He now affects tightly fitted fashionable suits almost effeminate in appearance. He turn into a party animal and if he had been a moderate drinker during his teens, twenties and early thirthies he now becomes almost a lush.
So, in the end, ERB was probably devoured by the Father in Cronus fashion. In the Myth Zeus forced Cronus to vomit up his brothers and sisters and he castrated him. In real life ERB was castrated and swallowed down.
He put up one heck of a fight that arouses the warmest admiration of him. One wonders, that if when all is said and done anyone can escape the imprint of those formative years. Is one’s whole horoscope cast in the womb and those few short months after birth? Sure hope not.
Pt. 2: Tarzan And The River
May 8, 2011
Tarzan And The River
Part II
Edgar Rice Burroughs In Aspic
by
R.E. Prindle
When ‘Omer smote his bloomin’ lyre,
He’d heard men sing by land and sea:
An’ what ‘e thought ‘e might require,
‘E went and took- the same as me!
The market-girls an’ fishermen,
The shepherds and the sailors, too,
They ‘eard old songs turn up again,
But kept it quiet- same as you!
They knew ‘e stole, ‘e knew they knowed,
They didn’t tell, nor make a fuss,
But winked at ‘Omer down the road.
An’ ‘e winked back= the same as us.
-Rudyard Kipling
I want a dream lover,
So I don’t have to dream alone.
–Bobby Darin
First published in the Burroughs Bulletin
Spring 2003 issue.
Last Night He Had The Strangest Dream
As an author Edgar Rice Burroughs belongs to the generation of writers who wrote between the wars. He is or should be placed beside Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, P.G. Wodehouse, H.G. Wells, John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck, among others. Further, of all those authors ERB was the best selling writer in the entire world. His reign came to an end in 1939 and then only after his talent was dissipated. This is a remarkable achievement against some very qualified and important writers. One doesn ‘t often hear of Steinbeck societies. Hemingway or any of the others but Burroughs societies exist in many countries around the world.
I consider myself an intellectual and literary snob, yet I acknowledge ERB as important an intellectual and literary figure as any of the savants mentioned above. ERB did not parade his knowledge and savvy as most writers are wont to do. He incorporated a fairly deep understanding of many contemporary issues without a hint of the lamp. Tarzan Triumphant is a case in point. Obviously the two religious groups in the novel refer to Jews and Christians, but there is no reference to either sect. One is left to infer that the Old Testament crowd led by Abraham, son of Abraham, is of the Old Testament while their rivals are New Testament. In so far as ERB allows the story to involve religious discussion, the moral is ‘a pox on both your houses.’
Even more remarkable is that over the writing of the published twenty-one Tarzans before 1940 all the novels are interrelated. ERB was able to keep his Tarzan facts in order over a twenty-seven year period of writing while being involved in the writing of dozens of other books. In point of fact the Tarzan oeuvre is a roman a fleuve- a river novel.
A River novle is a series of novels which traces the course of a nation, people, a family or an an individual over a period of at least decades. The first novel ever written was a River novel, that was the story of the Greek invasion of Troy.
The two surviving complete books of this remakarble story are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Moreover, many fragments exist predating the events of the Iliad and after.
Perhaps the most prodigious of all River novels is the Vulgate Lancelot chronicling the adventures of King Arthur and his knights. The story runs on for thousands of pages.
In modern times Alexander Dumas’ five volume epic concerning the adventures of the Three Musketeers constitute a River novel. Trollope wrote two, that of the Pallisers and the Barchester series. The model for the twentieth century was Remembrance Of Things Past by Marcel Proust.
Edgar Rice Burroughs has always been treated frivolously, yet the Tarzan oeuvre is a work of some magnitude which does not compare unfavorably with Proust.
Proust’s work looks backward as he relives his life trying to make order of his psychology. Burroughs’ Tarzan oeuvre records his psychological development on a current basis as it evolves year by year.
ERB’s work is characterized as imaginative fiction while Proust’s is considered realistic fiction. In other words, realistic fiction builds on real life experience in real life situations, while the imaginative writer is compelled to ‘invent’ incidents.
Thus while the realistic writer draws primarily from personal experience and observations, the imaginative writer has to draw from published sources of either fiction or nonfiction or convert real life experiences into symbolic form. The latter is more true of science and fantasy fiction. If the science fiction writers of the forties and fifties hadn’t had a couple thousand years of esoteric literature to draw on there would have been little science fiction. Of course the writers so disguise their sources that without an extensive education in esoteric writings oneself the stories seem incredibly original.
Borrowing from every source is extensive. For instance, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End is the same story as H.G. Wells’ Food Of The Gods with different detailing. Wells himself extrapolated his story farom Darwin’s Origin Of Species and The Descent Of Man. Darwin of course turned to nature, the ultimate source of suggestion, for his story.
That Burroughs borrowed extensively and sometimes blatantly is of little consequence, especially as his original contributions were so extensive and satisfying. As the opening poem by Kipling indicates, at least he was honest enough to admit of outside influences.
The Russian Quartet, or first four novels, is a tentative beginning to the Tarzan oeuvre. It is possible that the first novel, Tarzan Of The Apes, was just an attempt to express certain ideas about heredity and such related topics that ERB wanted to say with no thought of sequels. The story itself is absurd enough that it seems a miaracle that it was accepted and published. It is perhaps less surprising that it was so readily accepted by the reading public as the great figure of Tarzan rises shining from the pages. One ignores any story telling flaws to get a glimpse of the bronzed forest giant, the great Tarmangani, the jungle god, the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan. A writer should be so lucky to come up with such an archetypal figure.
Return and Beasts find Burroughs groping for a direction. Beasts is is heavily influenced by H.M. Stanley’s writing on Africa as well as that of Mungo Park, not to mention Edgar Wallace’s Sanders Of The River. The story of Paulevitch’s experience in the jungle was obviously taken from Mungo Park’s Travels In The Interior Of Africa. Beasts itself which also has a lot of Defoe in it, is absurd to the extreme yet somehow redeems itself as one becomes entranced by the outrageous notion of apes and men row-row-rowing their boat down the stream. Somewhere either before the beginning of Beasts or after the end, ERB interweaves the story of Barney Custer and the Mad King and the Eternal Lover to bring his own psychology into the Tarzan character. Thus ERB pictures himself as the Son Of Tarzan in the novel of that name.
Having resolved, after a fashion, his conflicts with this father and somewhere in that tremendous gush of writing having integrated his personality, ERB then turns to himself as the conflicted Animus of Tarzan the Hero and Tarzan the Clown to resolve that psychological dilemma over the next seventeen volumes published during his lifetime.
The Russian Quartet was written over a period of three years. The eight novels between Son and Lost Empire were written over fourteen years. Whether the ‘Lost Empire’ refers to Emma and Opar is open to conjecture. In any event Lost Empire signifies a terminal junction in ERB’s psychology.
Then as the problems of his Animus and Anima resolve themselves ERB rapidly turns out six volumes over four years.
He had difficulty writing Tarzans while struggling with his psychology but wrote quickly once he had made up his mind.
From 1934 in psychologically related volumes to 1938 he published the three additional novels of Quest, Forbidden city and Magnificent. The psychologically relevant Madman was discovered and published in 1964, fourteen years after his death. Perhaps the thought the novel was too personal and painful to publish himself.
As noted “Foreign Legion’ is a propagandistic after thought to the oeuvre.
As ERB didn’t begin writing until he was thirty-six it is fair to say that his writing represents the effort of a mature mind. This is even more evident when one reflects that the majority of the Tarzan oeuvre was written between the ages of forty-one and fifty-eight. Lion Man, which is the culminating volume of ERB’s psychological odyssey was written at the last age.
The novels written between 1930 and 1934 which I consider excellent work and the best of the Tarzan oeuvre are the ones most often dismissed as repetitious. One of the very best, Tarzan And The Leopard Men, is, oddly enough, often dismissed as ‘hack work’. Very strange.
But to return to Opar and move forward from there. From 1912 or 1911 if you consider from the first moment ERB put pen to paper to 1915, things developed very rapidly in ERB’s mind. The rich experience of his lifetime, all his opinions, thoughts and fancies were so compressed within his skull that as I say he erupted with more than the force of Spindletop. It took him three years to cap that gusher and then the flow was strong and steady until 1934 when he realized himself.
Return was written in 1913 when his Anima, La of Opar, first pops up. She then disappears until 1916 when wife Emma apparently sneered at the wealth ERB had laid at her feet. She would not so soon forget the first twelve years of her humiliation.
Her rejection of ERB the Hero must have hurt Burroughs to the quick. Following Return he wrote The Mad King in which after numerous trials and tribulations and after he had disposed of Custer’s inept doppelganger, the Mad King, Barney Custer and the Princess Emma were reconciled. In all likelihood the story was a day-dream of wish fulfillment in the Freudian manner because in The Eternal Lover which followed quickly Barney Custer goes to Tarzan’s Equatorial estate but with his sister Victoria and not the ‘Princess Emma’. His marital relationship is obviously still very troubled. As noted, The Eternal Lover is a myth of the nature of Pysche and Eros, the Anima and Animus.
Interestingly, Boy Jack’s wife, which is to say ERB’s at the end of Son of Tarzan is no longer a princess but the daughter of a general. Emma had apparently been demoted in ERB’s emotions.
In a psychological quandary ERB has Tarzan leave Jane in 1916 to return to Opar and La for more gold to lay at Jane/Emma’s feet. This story is crucial for the rest of the oeuvre. ERB’s dream lover, La, spares his life and offers to marry him or in other words take him away from Jane/Emma. At this point in his life ERB is faithful in body if not in spirit. He declines her offer having his faithful Waziri stagger back to Jane under a load of one hundred twenty pounds of gold each.
Apparently the wealth of Opar of which tons of gold remained to be tapped as well as bushels of the very largest of diamonds (move ahead to the Father of Diamonds in the Forbidden City) is not enough to assuage Jane/Emma’s anger at Ed’s failure for the first twelve years of married life. She rejects ERB’s present income. This must have been a staggering blow for Burroughs who at this point in his life wanted to abandon his clown role for that of the hero.
He had already begun Jungle Tales Of Tarzan, which he managed to finish, otherwise from Jewels of Opar to Tarzan the Untamed there is a hiatus in Tarzan novels for thirty-nine months. For over three years he and Emma were apparently at a stalemate making it impossible for him to write further Tarzan adventures.
When Tarzan returns it is as The Untamed and he and Jane have been separated, possibly for good as Tarzan has no idea where she is; common report is that she is dead.
One may infer that the marriage is all but over. It takes another twenty-three months before Tarzan The Terrible appears. Tarzan goes from Untamed to Terrible. Apparently ERB and Emma are now temporarily reconciled as Tarzan finds Jane in the forgotten land of Pal-ul-don (paladin?) and he, she and Jack go swinging down the jungle trails to return to Equatoria. the family is reunited. But is it?
After the passage of twenty-two months Burroughs follows Terrible with Golden Lion. Now the title Golden Lion is somewhat misleading as the Lion doesn’t play that large a role in the story. The Lion seems to have sprung from Burroughs’ subconscious as a defense against the Lion of Emma. In this story Tarzan leaves Jane for a fairly extended visit to his dream lover, La in Opar. They are together for some time as they adventure into the adjacent lost valley called The Valley Of Diamonds. (Once again, see Tarzan And The Forbidden City.) Possibly the Father of Diamonds represents the Jewel of Great Price which turns out ironically to be a piece of coal. This was after ERB left Emma for Florence.
Golden Lion introduces the great doppelganger of Tarzan, Esteban Miranda. I am absolutely fascinated by this character. Miranda looks, talks and walks so much like Tarzan that not only can’t Jane/Emma tell them apart but Miranda even fools the faithful Waziri.
Golden Lion is paired with Tarzan And The Ant Men. You have to read both to get the whole story.
Esteban Miranda is a London actor, a clown and a cowardly fool. ERB goes to great lengths to deliniate the character of this unpleasant but goofily amiable alter ego.
In the confusion Miranda is captured by a savage tribe of Blacks where he is spared because of his resemblance to Tarzan. He escapes finally although he is a blithering idiot who has lost his memory. Get that! Even Tarzan’s doppelganger loses his memory. I haven’t been able to fugure out ERB’s problems with his memory yet.
He is discovered by the Waziri where he is once again mistaken for the real thing. He is taken to the ranch house where Jane nurses him back to health. Still mistakes him for the real Tarzan, he is about to be embraced lovingly by Jane when the terrible, untamed Tarzan appears through the French windows. Tarzan himself had been off having incredible adventures with the Ant Men returning just in the nick of time.
Here apparently Jane rejects Burroughs the Hero in favor of Burroughs the Clown of the first twelve years of her marriage. This is something which ERB can’t forgive. His resentment turns into a divorce about ten years later.
There is then another long hiatus of approximately forty months before Tarzan returns as Lord of the Jungle with Jane in a very subsidiary role. So in twelve years Burroughs wrote only about five Tarzan novels. Then between 1929 and 1934 he whipped out an additional seven.
The change of pace was caused by the quickening resolution of ERB’s psychological dilemma. He was obviously living his life vicariously as Tarzan.
It is this development of his psychology recorded through Tarzan that makes the oeuvre the most fascinating of River novels.
Let us understand that a writer, any writer, is always discussing his own psychology. this applies both to so-called non-fiction as well as fiction. Properly speaking there is no such thing as non-fiction. The difference between the two is that in non-fiction a writer describes actual events through a prism of so-called objectivity. In other words in writing about Edgar Rice Burroughs I am bound to adhere to the facts of ERB’s life and I cannot invent details to improve the story. However, in actuality I see what my own psychology has prepared me to see. My psychology, that is, in conjunction with my intelligence and emotional perspicuity.
Anyone who has read the autobiography of Frank Harris knows that his favorite adage is that no man can see over the top of his head. Therefore it behooves every man to broaden and develop his experience so that he can stand as tall as possible. In that way he can at least hopefully see over the heads of all his fellows. I was once fortunate enough to try this on a crowded street in Hong Kong where I stood head and shoulders above my fellow Chinese pedestrians. You could see the heads and shoulders of all the American sailors inching slowly along like icebergs in a sea of Chinese.
But seriously, one must develop one’s intelligence and that is exactly what Edgar Rice Burroughs did throughout his life. ERB was an avid reader both of fiction and non-fiction. He makes frequent allusion to Poe, Wells, Doyle and who I think he respects most, Rudyard Kipling. If you have read the great African explorers you will have no difficulty identifying sources. ERB was quick in picking up new titles also. Forbidden City was, I believe, based partially on Digging For Lost African Gods by Byron Khun de Protok published in 1926.
ERB was also forced to respond to hectoring outside criticism. I’m sure he little knew the effect that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 would have on him personally, but by 1933’s Leopard Men he was thrown on the defensive by what H.G. Wells called the ‘Open Conspiracy’ or the Red Revolution. I will deal with it in the last essay in our series called ‘Star Begotten.’
All of Burroughs stories are many layered if you care to look beyond the surface details. After Golden Lion ERB develops a whole jungle family of attendant animals which follow him through all the stories. Each novel is merely one episode in the life of Tarzan/Burroughs and each leads to the next novel in true River fashion.
This is wonderful stuff. There is no difficulty understanding why Burroughs was the best selling author of his time.
After recording the difficulties of reconciling himself with Emma from 1916 to 1928 ERB reluctantly threw in the towel when he wrote Tarzan And The Lost Empire. The double entendre of the lost empire is explicit in between the lines. It is not only the Lost Empire deep in the Heart Of Darkness but also his dream of building a great empire with Emma. The dissolution of his marriage and his search for a real live La of Opar begins with the book.
At this point he has also come under attack by the Reds who cannot tolerate the success of a Conservative writer. Consolidating rapidly from 1917 to 1923, by this time the Revolution was in control of publishing. They could deny access to new conservative writers, creating the myth that all the best new writers were Communist in faith, but they still had to destroy the reputations of older, non-conforming writers.
I don’t know that any studies have been made of literary or journalistic attacks on ERB, but he responds as though there were many. In 1929 he took time out from his personal psychology to write a major counter-attack against the Revolution with Tarzan At The Earth’s Core.
While this may appear to be simply a critique of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, in fact Einstein was as much a political figure as a scientific one. Both he and Freud were prominent agents of the ‘Open Conspiracy’ along with that literary political agent, H.G. Wells, so that Earth’s Core is a counter-attack on his detractors.
Then in quick succession ERB turned out Tarzan the Invicinble, (watch the titles) Tarzan Triumphant, Tarzan And The City Of Gold, Tarzan And The Leopard Men and Tarzan And The Lion Man.
After a long struggle Burroughs quickly resolved his psychological dilemma. He rectified his Animus, disposing of the clown side of his nature while at the same time reconciling his Anima. He divorced Emma while marrying what he fancied was a La of Opar in Florence. The final conflict with Emma is recorded in City Of Gold. The basic idea for City was probably borrowed from Bulfinch’s The Legends Of Charlemagne. In Legends, an enchantress has captured many of the leading palladins of Charlemagne which she has imprisoned in a city of gold. The medieval writers borrowed the story of Odysseus and Circe from Homer.
In Burroughs’ story the enchantress Nemone has ‘captured’ a bemused Tarzan who may escape any time he chooses but he elects to stay around to see what will happen.
Lion Man is notable for the way Burroughs blends psychology, fiction, the movies and how the movies affect the perception of reality of movie-goers. Film, which was developed during Burroughs’ young manhood, had a profound effect on the movie-goer’s ability to distinguish real life from movie fantasy. Burroughs was qite precocious in understanding this. There are earlier references to the matter in his work but here he gives it a full scale examination, both as when the fictional Tarzan replaces the even more fictional Obroski in Africa and when as a Burroughs doppelganger Tarzan mixes on set with the movie people in Hollywood where they fail to recognize him as the real thing, Lion Man is perhaps the most interesting of all the Tarzan novels.
After Lion Man, which both rectifies his Animus and reconciles his Anima, his motive for writing fast and furious disappeared. In fact, his subject matter disappears. He had in effect run out of material. Tarzan’s Quest and Tarzan And The Forbidden City record his lingering problems with his two ladies at the age of sixty-three. You can see why he wrote it as a farce.
Tarzan And The Madman caps the story of his pschological development although he did not publish the novel during his lifetime.
At the end, as is not unusual, he returned to the beginning as in The Mad King. The totally farcical Forbidden City is an example of what his writing might have turned into if he had been allowed to publish under his pseudonym, Normal Bean. As a comic novel, Forbidden City is actually very funny, if absurd, as Tarzan is driven from pillar to post by his two women. This undoubtedly reflects his real life situation. In the end, he says, the fabulous diamond he and everyone else is seeking, the Jewel Of Great Price, is merely a mirage turning out to be as worthless as a piece of coal.
Both Lion Man and Forbidden City seem to have influenced Aldous Huxley, one of the major intellectual writers of the period. His novel, After Many A Summer Dies The Swan (1939), has allusions to Burroughs’ two novels. The theme of ‘Lion Man’ of the mad scientist, God, who reverts to a half-ape, half-man creature is replicated in Swan in which an English nobleman who has lived for two hundred years reverts to an apelike existence.
That the theme may be more than coincidental is the fact that Huxley incorporates an imaginary University of Tarzana into the story. Thus one of the great intellectuals of the period found much of deep interest in ERB’s novels while also reacting to Wells.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was in fact a great literary artist, if a trifle coarse. He is, in fact, a great talent which if the critics fail to realize it, the people don’t.
Surviving a hundred years is no small matter, it takes some talent to do that. Yet, after those hundred years ERB is still an active force in the literary coal mines. Well, it’s not like coal doesn’t burn with a pure blue flame and under pressure turn into diamonds.
Tarzan Meets The Wizard
April 21, 2011
The Big Bwana
Tarzan Meets The Wizard
by
R.E. Prindle
I opened the door…(this was way back in nineteen-fifty when I was twelve years old and bought my first Tarzan book)…and stepped inside the Argonaut Bookstore. This America was in a parallel universe compared to what you see today. What I’m telling you here seemingly happened millions of years ago on another planet in a different universe. Believe me, you couldn’t function in the world I’m talking about.
The Argonaut was downtown. That won’t mean anything to you now, but in those days there were no shopping malls. Things weren’t big and strung out. Downtown was not only the center of activity, there was no other activity. You had to shop downtown. Thus if your store wasn’t located on the four main blocks of Genessee, and two didn’t really count, your store was, as they say, marginalized. The Argonaut was half a block off Genesee but in the center street off the two good blocks on the right side, the left side was a lot weaker than the right. There was a chance someone might turn the corner and see your store. Not too likely though.
The scale would amaze you. This was small. Imagine yourself as you playing with your Lionel electric train. Yeah, it was that small in comparison. Barnes & Noble mega bookstores weren’t even a gleam in a booksellers’ eyes. The thought would have been incredible. It would have taken up one of the two good blocks on the right side. The Argonaut was maybe twelve feet wide and fifty feet deep. Mahogany shelving down one side beginning waist high with storage underneath, nothing there, a couple display tables down the middle, check out to the right. The prop. would have been lucky to take home two hundred fifty dollars a day. So out of a hundred dollars markup he not only met all expenses but lived as a respected business man. As I say, a different world.
The owner dealt only with White people. The only minority was the Black folk and they were confined to the First Ward. The Italians were emerging from their ghettoes in the post-war world so pizza shops were showing as a novelty. The owner only had to stock his shelves for one buying public. Half of his inventory would have been ‘the classics.’ There were virtually no novels published after WWI on sale except for current literature and that was generally considered inferior to the classics.
Great immigration changes were in the air while the last vestiges of the previously dominant English club style were slowly disappearing. Thus the Argonaut was designed to look like it might have been Lord Greystoke’s personal library, mahogany, dark woods and all.
I was only two years out of the Orphanage and feeling my way to some sort of identity. I would never find it in my old home town, it wasn’t there.
I hadn’t ever bought a book at the Argonaut before, as an Orphan I would have been shooed out in the most unkindly manner. As it was the classiest and only real book store in town I was anxious with anticipation. The library at the Orphanage had been my refuge, a very nice library too, as big or bigger than the Argonaut and all kid’s books. The other orphans viewed it as The Black Hole Of Calcutta so I had always had the place to myself. Donations to the Orphanage were terrific so I was familiar with the whole range of children’s books from Raggedy Ann And Andy to my favorites, the Oz series. In those days I was mystified by the change of authorship after the first dozen books but I was quick to note the inferior style of his successors.
I don’t remember any Tarzans or other Burroughs.
I was a free rover back in the Orphanage days so I knew about the Argonaut as it was across the street from the magazine store where I bought my Blackhawks, Daredevil and Plastic Man comics. They were only a dime so all I had to do was pick up five bottles with a redemption value of 2 cents each and I was in business; but now I was going to spend a dollar. Don’t know where I got it.
I had scouted the place and knew where everything was so when I entered and looked down the long row of shelves stocked with what would now be a miniscule library I knew to turn left just inside the door to the space alotted to Juvenile Literature. Tom Swift and the Rover Boys among others were still available but nobody bought them. Stiff stuff. Swift was too stiff for words. I never could enjoy the stuff although the oldtimers swore by him. And there next to the Oz books was Tarzan. There were only about eight of them available at the time along with five of the Martian series.
The Burroughs stuff was all put out by Grossett and Dunlap, my favorite publishers. Something about the paper and the binding. There were several other publishers who put out classy kid books, Cupples And Leon. They had the look and feel that made you feel like a man on the way. Now the Barnes and Noble Juvenile section, bigger than the whole Argonaut, is a pile of indoctrination in generally offensive looking and feeling volumes. Lot of ’em made in China. Chinese don’t know a thing about paper and books. I’m glad I spent my youth in that other universe.
Back then you could buy Whitman Co., Racine, Wisconsin, abridgments for fifty-nine cents if you didn’t have a dollar. I could never get over why Whitman’s were published in Racine when everything else was published in New York City. I’m sure there was some weird reason. I had my dollar in my hand. I focused my concentration in a steady beam and was intensely glancing from title to title comparing the dust jacket illustrations when, as though from afar, faintly a voice partially intruded into my conscious to say: ‘I’m Jason, can I help you?’
It was so faint I didn’t really hear it, the voice merely brushed past my concentration; then I felt what I thought was a very hard tap on my shoulder. Wincing, I looked up.
‘I’m Jason, can I help you?’ he said more imperiously, left hand on hip with his left leg resting on the tip of his shoe.
‘Help me do what?’ I asked uncomprehendingly.
‘Find the book you’re looking for?’ He replied with a condescending, well, not a sneer, but you know what I mean.
At the same time I realized that although I wanted a Tarzan book I didn’t have any idea which one was the best to start with.
This guy Jason as I surveyed him in my pre-teen way was a pretty impressive guy He was an easy six feet. I was about four feet ten, imperially slim (a phrase I’ve always wanted to work in) dressed to the nines in a collegiate cut suit, blue button down oxford cloth shirt (still the only kind of shirt material), and rep stripe tie. (Never liked rep stripes, prefer paisleys and foulards). He was good looking, he could have stepped out of an Arrow shirt ad or modeled for one of those German postage stamps of the late thirties. God, those Leyendecker ads were just awesome.
Jason would have been a killer with the girls too, if he had just come unstuck from himself. But, heck, if I looked like that I might have been satisfied with myself too.
He stood there leaning on the counter with his right arm, his left arm cocked on his hip and his right leg across his left leg. God, I’ve never seen a pair of pants with a crease like that and I never will again. I’ve never been able to get it and I’ve bought more suits than Huey Long who couldn’t get that crease either.
I can say that I was overawed by Jason.
‘I wanted to buy a Tarzan book.’ I began timidly. ‘Do you know anything about them?’
‘Do I know anything about them?’ He said with a knowing chuckle as he brought his bent fingers up for a minute examination of his nails. ‘I should think so. I’ve read them all.’
‘OK. Which one. I’ve got my dollar.’
‘Which one?’ He asked irritatingly. He had this annoying habit of repeating your question as well as his now constant steady admiration of his finger nails. He did have a good manicure. A manicure of any kind was a rarity in our town. Hair cuts were pretty common. First he would do one hand and then the other. Sometimes both at once. He was something to watch. Enjoyed preening for me too.
‘Hmm. For you?’ He said musingly as though I were a special case. ‘Well, you know, there’s only eight available out of twenty so you can only choose from those eight. I’ve got them all, every one. Had to go to second hand stores which I’m loath to do but this case called for an exception. Those eight are new though. I’ve thought about the Tarzan novels a great deal. I divide them into three categories for convenience. The first four I call the Russian Quartet, the next eight I call the Jungle Rhapsodies and the eight after them, Political Undertones.
These eight are all from Grosset and Dunlap and they’re all that’s available new. The titles Burroughs self-published are all out of print…
‘What do you mean Russian Quartet?’ This was the beginning of the McCarthy Reaction and I was a pretty keen anti-Communist, or about to become one.
‘Well, it seems to me that Burroughs concieved the first four volumes as a unit without plans to go further. Of course, the first volume introduces Tarzan but then he used the literary devices of the two Russian nihilists who are after Tarzan to continue the story through volumes two and to four. He kills off the last Russian in Son Of Tarzan and then leaves no room for a continuation of the series.
The Quartet is probably written in too literary a style for you. Burroughs was trying hard to follow the rules of fine literature in the Quartet.’
‘What happened then?’
‘What happened then?’ There he went again bringing up both sets of nails for scrutiny and adopting that wide apart stance of that famous picture of Burroughs flexing his muscles.
‘I think he was at a loss what to do next. I think he had written out his original conception of Tarzan. I mean, Tarzan was virtually a moribund old man at the end of Son of Tarzan.’
‘Yeah, but you said there’s a whole bunch of other books.’
‘His original conception, I said. About this time he went way out West in Hollywood, where I’m going soon, I’m going to be a big movie star with my looks, where he met L. Frank Baum. Baum wrote a number of the Oz stories, have heard of him?’
‘Of course I have.’ I snuffed, deeply offended that anyone would think I didn’t know who L. Frank Baum was. Ozma of Oz was the first book I ever read on my own.
‘Uh huh.” He said, condescendingly looking down his nose, but impressed. ‘I think that he and Baum had some long walks and summer talks and Baum gave him some pointers. Baum was older than Burroughs. He was born in eighteen fifty-fix and died in nineteen-nineteen just after he passed the torch to Burroughs, so to speak.’
‘How do you know when L. Frank Baum lived and died, I wonder?’
‘It’s my job to know these things.’ He smiled condescendingly. ‘Just like Burroughs was born in eighteen seventy-five and died the day before yesterday.’
‘You’re kidding me, now?’ I said, unwilling to be taken in.
‘I kid you not, kid. Day before yesterday he breathed his last breath. Expired, just like that. As I was saying, Baum probably told him to make Tarzan and Africa over on the model of Dorothy, the Wizard and Oz. That way he could move Tarzan North, South, East and West just as Baum did with his characters in the Oz series. Oz has its metropolis of the Emerald City and then the outlying areas where all these odd creatures live.
Burroughs listened. So in the fifth Tarzan book, Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar, the story changes from a more or less realistic vision of Africa to one of hidden cities, lost empires and strange mythical locations like the giant boma of the Ant Men or Pal-ul-don. Tarzan, as the Wizard, works out of his estate in East Africa as a substitute for the Emerald City.
By adopting Baum’s formula Burroughs was able to keep his series going until he died, the day before yesterday. His writing style changes too, from formal to Baum’s loose…’
‘Gridley,’ Came the voice of the proprietor, ‘You’ve got a customer over here if you can spare the time.’
‘What am I, a grilled cheese sandwich?’ I thought resentfully looking over to the cash register where I saw a man holding a copy of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity. ‘Oh, that’s different,’ I rationalized. That was worth two-fifty in this man’s Democracy so I could see why he was going for the big money first.
Jason grabbed a copy of The Jewels Of Opar, thrust it in my hands and said: ‘Here, kid, start with this one.’
I was leery of the Russian Quartet for obvious political reasons while Jason had said that Jewels Of Opar was like Oz so taking his expert advice it was my first Tarzan.
This guy having purchased his James Jones walked over me like I wasn’t there, didn’t even look down, he was only about five-six too. I put my Tarzan and dollar on the counter, received my bagged book in return.
‘Come again, kid.’ Jason said flippantly as I opened he door.
‘I guess you’ll be off to Hollywood starring in movies before then.’ I waved. ‘I’ll be back.’ Then it was down Genesee and back to home, the proud possessor of my first Tarzan book that I still have.
Last I time I checked they were selling the same book for forty-five dollars without a dust jacket. Mine still has an excellent jacket.
Pt. I: Tarzan And The River
April 14, 2011
Tarzan And The River
by
R.E. Prindle & Dr. Anton Polarion
I know those ideas;
In my boyhood days I read Shelley
and dreamed of Liberty.
There is no Liberty save wisdom and self-control.
Liberty is within-
not without.
It is each man’s own affair.
–H.G. Wells, When The Sleeper Wakes
The River don’t stop here anymore.
–Carly Simon, Let The River Run
Dr. Polarion and I have undertaken to write this essay together: He to handle the psychological aspects while I deal with the literary parts. As he has been called away on business I write his ideas from personal coversations and notes he has given me.
The reference to the river in the title is not to the Congo as one might suspect but to the river of life in the psychological sense and to the roman a fleuve or River Novel in the literary sense.
In the psychological sense the River refers to the Flood on which we are all borne heedlessly to the sea of oblivion unless we somehow free ourselves of the current. That is the meaning of the quote from Carly Simon. She thought she had gained control of her life and emotions; reclaimed herself from the vast irresistable flow of the River, so to speak.
As Dr. Polarion has explained in the other essays, ERB was working out his psychological difficulties through his writing. He first integrated his personality and then rectified his Animus concluding with reconciling his Anima and Animus. As in all lives ERB’s early life was an accumulation of fixations that had to be exorcised in later life. One either succumbs to one’s psychology in the sense of Hamlet’s complaint: To be or not to be…whether ’tis nobler, in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them,’ or, in other words, one confronts the psychological issues and resolves them.
Understanding, that is the problem. For ERB’s first thirty-seven years he suffered the slings and arrows in his mind, but then at age thirty-seven a glimmer of understanding appeared in his mind and he chose to take arms to end his sea of troubles.
One can only guess at the pricks and prods that drove him on his way. Fortunately ERB left a very wide and detailed paper trail of the workings of his mind. For the first thirty-seven years of his life the subliminal pressures built and built until with a mighty roar they rose to the surface in a terrific eruption not unlike the fabled gusher Spindletop.
Title after title spewed forth from ERB’s pen in an impetuous irresistible flow. From 1912 to 1915 no less than seventeen novels were unleashed on the world. Included in those novels was the creation of one of the great mythological figures of world literature- Tarzan Of The Apes.
It was through these novels that Burroughs took up arms against that sea of troubles to end them.
Dr. Polarion who is a Depth psychologist, believes and demonstrates to my satisfaction that as a result of ‘talking’ his way through his fixations ERB integreted his personality in 1915.
The integration of the personality is a major desideratum although, while a blessing, the integration is much less of a blessing than many Depth psychologists believe. When one eliminates one thing one must replace it with another. An empty self cannot be allowed to exist, nor will the self tolerate it. I have had to fill the void left left when with Dr. Polarion’s assistance I integrated my personality.
For ERB who had little understanding and no guidance, the integration of his personality was as much a curse as a blessing. But more on that in Part II.
Following Dr. Polarion: the disintegration of the personality occurs when the individual is presented with challenges to which he cannot satisfactorily respond. The most serious reactions occur in one’s youthful years when one’s understanding is least developed. Quite minor incidents cause the most serious fixations as the child or youth has not the intellectual means to understand and respond to them successfully.
Each failure of response causes a fixation in the subconsious mind. At this point Dr. Polarion discards the Freudian notion of the Unconscious in favor of the subconscious. He believes that there is no such thing as the Unconscious. Each psychological fixation has a corresponding psychological or physical affect. These are what Freud identified as neuroses and psychoses or what were later recognized as psychosomatic reactions. Thus a neurosis may interfere with one’s basic responses while a psychosis has a debilitating effect. An example of a neurosis might be a nervous twitch while the most debilitating of psychoses might be manic-depression or schizophrenia. The less severe the cause, the easier to reach.
It is here that Freud’s ‘talking cure’ comes into effect. Freud discovered, or learned from his colleague, Breuer, that when a person recognized his fixation and discussed it the physical or psychological manifestations disappeared. In many cases such affects appear only in certain circumstances.
Let me give you three quick examples: The modern pop singer Meatloaf,, the nineteenth century explorer Richard Francis Burton and ERB himself.
The pop singer, Meatloaf acquired a deep inferiority complex during his childhood. He had been made to believe that he was worthless. When he became a pop star he felt unworthy of his success. Hence, having a subconscious fixation or need to reject his success for which he felt unworthy, he one day lost his singing voice. In orther words, his subconscious fixation blocked his ability to vocalize and continue to be a success. The physical manifestation of his fixation was the loss of his singing voice.
Meatloaf sought the advice of a psychologist who was both astutue and honest. After talking to Meatloaf for a few minutes in his first session, the psychologist had his client figured. he simply asked Meatloaf to admit out loud that he was a Star. Meatloaf resisted as one might expect, but on the psychologist’s insistence he reluctantly said: ‘Oh, all right, I’m a star.’
That’s all it took. That is the ‘talking cure’. From that moment on, Meatloaf exorcised his fixation and regained his singing voice. Of course, that only eliminated the symptom but not the underlying cause. Meatloaf just shifted his psychosomatic affect to another manifestation of it.
Not all fixations are that easy to reach. The more painful the fixation the harder it is to reach. Thus while Meatloaf’s symptom was relieved the fixation of unworthiness remained intact. The explorer Richard Burton (Richard Francis Burton, not to be confused with the late actor husband of the late Elizabeth Taylor.) sought the source of the Nile in the eighteen-sixties. If he had succeeded, he would have been made for life as well as having a secure place in history.
Burton was however severely conflicted on the Animus while have a debilitating central childhood fixation in his subconscious, a killer combination. Actually, he was a latent homosexual.
There was only one way to travel in Africa and that was on foot. Hence his subconscious placed a psychosomatic affect on his legs making it impossible to walk! Burton naturally failed in his quest but regained the full use of his legs when failure was irremediable. He never had trouble with his legs again.
While suffering from fever in Africa, Burton had the remarkably vivid vision of himself as two different personalities, the one always defeating the ambitions of the other. The two personalities were visions of his conscious and subconscious minds Thus the fixation symbolically represented itself to him, but Burton was unable to penetrate the symbol. Had he been able to do so he would immediately have been able to get on his feet as nimble as ever.
The true natue of Burton’s conflict was that he couldn’t acknowledge his homosexual reaction to his fixation. His youthful sexual violation or molestation was his central childhood fixation, but we’ll let that pass. The central childhood fixation is the most fearful of all.
Edgar Rice Burroughs had a fixation from his father. He believed his dad to be a great man, probably one that could never be equaled or surpassed. ERB’s early failures may have been a fear of challenging his father’s image. His father had been a military success in the War Between The States. ERB probably joined the Army to emulate his father. He was sent to Apache territory. However, the fear of failing to measure up to his father or exceed him caused a psychological reaction or psycho-somatic affect.
For the length of his service, which was cut short by his appeal to his father, he contracted a case of diarrhea which didn’t leave him until he gave up the military, thus ending any fear of equaling of surpassing his father. ERB’s diarrhea was purely a defensive psychological reaction to his fixation.
ERB began his writing career in desperation. It probably never occurred to him that his writing would make him not only as successful as his father but more successful, else he mgiht not have been able to write. Judging from the context of the Tarzan novels, I would say that this conflict with his father was resolved between the writing of The Son Of Tarzan and The Jewels Of Opar. There is a decided change of direction from the one to the other.
The Russian Quartet of the first four novels therefor forms a sort of prolegomena or introduction to the rest of the oeuvre There is a fair amount of indecision in the four novels as ERB seeks for the handle of his great works
In his tradition of Tarzan doppelgangers the two novels of Tarzan Of The Apes and Son Of Tarzan may be considered near duplicates of each other; in fact, Father and Son as the titles indicate.
Two other novels separate from but related to the Tarzan oeuvre may be counted as part of it due to their role in the development of ERB’s psychology. These two are The Mad King and The Eternal Lover. The MadKing is a preliminary attempt by ERB to rectify the conflicting aspects of his Anima through the doppelgangers of the Mad King and Barney Custer, while the Eternal Lover is a precocious attempt to reconcile his Animus and Anima. Not surprisingly, Barney Custer is prominent in both novels. Custer then melds into the neo-Tarzan of Jewels Of Opar where the two conflicted aspects Burroughs’ Animus appear in one Tarzan, off set.
The name Barney Custer as an alter ego for ERB is interesting, General George Custer who we all know was massacred at the Little Big Horn a year after ERB was born was amongst the greatest of American heroes for about seventy-five years. After 1950 the luster was diminished and then turned completely around to the point that he is now the most prominent villain of American history and a symbol of shame to the Paleface.
But in 1914, by taking the name of Custer, ERB was identiying himself with America’s greatest contemporary hero. The first name, Barney, undoubtedly refers to the daredevil auto racer Barney Oldfield. This must be especially apparent in the Mad King in which Barney Custer is a daring, even wild auto driver. It should be noted too that ERB had only recently become an auto owner and driver so he is probably projecting an ideal of what he wanted to be. So the character of Barney Custer itself is a doppelganger rolled into one.
The novel The Eternal Lover takes place either in the time between Return Of Tarzan and Beasts or between Beasts and Son. In either case, Barney Custer is melded into either Tarzan or boy Jack, probably the latter as Tarzan repesents Burroughs’ father in Son.
Son Of Tarzan is a charming coming of age novel in which boy Jack emulates his father, grows into his loin cloth, or g-string and is finally reunited with his dad in London. Here the Russian Quartet is completed and the story logically comes to an end, as there are no loose ends for sequels.
In real life during this three year period from 1912 to 1915 ERB has risen from a more or less abject failure to a towering success. From a position of hapless inadequacy compared to his father as the novel Son Of Tarzan records, he has succeeded in his mind at least in equaling his father, athough as on the return to London Tarzan remains a patriarch and boy Jack recedes into the background it is fairly obvious that ERB did not really believe he surpassed his dad. Lingering traces of diarrhea, no doubt.
What ERB has done however is to eliminate the fixation in his subconscious. By doing so he integrated his personality.
Conflicted as he was, this rapid turnaround in financial status must have been a tremendous ego boost to a very frustrated man on the cusp of his mid-life crisis.
One can argue the relative value of the dollar but I estimate the buying power of Burroughs’ earnings for the period in today’s dollars of least three to five million dollars.
When one considers that he bought a house, which he turned into a country club with out buildings and enough land to build a city for one hundred thousand dollars which wouldn’t equal a single lot today the value of the dollar has no real comparison. ERB chose to call his new estate Tarzana which gives some indication of the importance of Tarzan in his mind.
Following the principles of Freud’s ‘talking cure’ somewhere in that great gush of writing ERB brought his central childhood fixation into the open where he resolved it so that the fixation’s mental and physical affects disappeared, uniting his conscious and subconscious minds into one interated personality.
Following psychological roles ERB must then have resolved fixation after fixation until he was free of compusive behavior.
Having united his conscious and subconscious minds, ERB was then given the psychological task of rectifying his Animus into one single directed sexual identity or Ego and then reconciling his Animus with his Anima. ERB did this, placing him ahead of Freud and Jung as a psychologist, although he may not have known how to express his achievement in scientific terms.
Dr. Polarion believes that ERB was aware of his achievement but as he had no scientific standing he must have thought it better to demonstrate his achievement in the Tarzan oeuvre while keeping his mouth shut.
There can be no question that ERB was a very educated, even learned man, although without the Ivy League credentials for which he so obviously yearned. The amount of learning evident in the Tarzan oeuvre is really quite astonishing. His background n African studies alone is extensive.
Having integrated his personality through the Russian Quartet, those four novels form a completed unit. In order to keep writing Tarzan novels Burroughs had to shift his emphasis. Then with the novel Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar he began a more extended roman a fleuve or River Novel.
The subsequent novels are all involved with the problem of working out the rectification of the Animus and reconciliation with his Anima.
I personally (Dr. Polarion concurs) do not consider Tarzan And The Foreign Legion part of the true Tarzan oeuvre. The book was an afterthought written duing World War II for propagandistic purposes, consequently being outside ERB’s psychological development.
The last book apart from Foreign Legion published during his lifetime was Tarzan The Magnificent. Richard A. Lupoff discovered three stories after Burroughs’ death which were combined into Tarzan And The Castaways and a completed manuscript, Tarzan And The Madman, which is the culminating value in ERB’s psychologcal development and may be genuinely considered part of the oeuvre.
Thus the liberty of which H.G. Wells spoke in the introductory quote was achieved by ERB. He had acquired wisdom and self-control. One might say he was as ‘free’ as any man can be which, after all, as the mystics say, is merely uniting oneself with the ‘will of god’ or nature, in other words, integrating one’s personality.
Having disposed of the Russian Quartet which forms a sort of prolegomena to the oeuvre, I will now turn to Part II to the explication of the Tarzan oeuvre as a roman a fleur.
I, Dynamo 