Pt. IV: Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Accreted Personality
April 28, 2012
Edgar Rice Burroughs
And
The Accreted Personality
Part IV
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Launched In Life (1896-1912)
As critical as Ed’s first twenty years were, the next eight years would set the seal on his life. Along with the two critical events of the first twenty years he would add two more. For a more detailed account of the 1896-1900 period see my four part essay Four Critical Years In The Life Of Edgar Rice Burroughs here on I, Dynamo or its first publication site Bill Hillman’s superb ERBzine.
Having graduated from MMA Ed now found himself facing the very difficult task of launching himself in life. This is a terrible, terrible time in any young man’s life. As Ed is going to enlist in the Army in Detroit without going back to Chicago to even say goodbye to his parents and friends including Emma who is waiting for him one has to assume that he resented his father for abandoning him to the Military school.
The abandonment was extremely painful to him so that he would later visit the same experience on his sons as well as his second wife Florence’s very young son. All the boys rejected Military school as he had although Ed relented and let them come back home. Coming back home was probably in emulation of what he hoped his father would do but didn’t.
At this point then, as Freud would say, Ed was troubled by reminiscences. He had fixated on those two major trouble spots, his confrontation with John the Bully and his abandonment by his father coupled with his troubled school years when he was shifted from school to school unable to form any stable relationships. During the rest of his life he would never be able to stop moving, changing residences some forty odd times. So, his path is clear before him.
For various reasons Ed’s first choice for a career was as an Army officer. He had taken the exam for West Point but failed the cut. In this year after graduation then with West Point lost Ed was very, very despondent. If he had waited while showing promise as an instructor at the Michigan Military Academy it is quite possible that his Commandant, Col. Rogers, and Capt. King might have been able to obtain an appointment for him. But in May of 1896 Ed abandoned his post without notice to enlist as a private. In the military abandoning one’s post is an unforgivable offence. Ed forfeited whatever goodwill he had obtained.
In his despair he asked the recruiter to be sent to the most godforsaken post they had. The Army had just the place for him; it was in blazing hot Arizona at a post called Fort Grant. The pacification of the Apaches was still going on. Ed realized he had made a horrid mistake. The details are not necessary here but Ed appealed to his father to get his early release from his obligation. His father did this, apparently combined with a medical release based on what soldiers called ‘a tobacco heart.’ In other words, he scammed his way out. This came back to haunt him a couple decades later after he became famous when an old soldier wrote to ask him if he was the Ed Burroughs with the tobacco heart.
There were a few negative memories then of his brief stint in the Army. However the stay in Arizona was so memorable that Ed fell in love with the country. He liked Arizona and he really liked and admired the Apaches. One of his two cowboy novels took place in Arizona and both his Apache novels. In studying for background for his Apache novels Ed became something of an expert or, at least, very knowledgeable. I’m sure he could have lectured on both the Apaches and Old Arizona.
Thus Ed was becoming familiar with the country, Illinois, Michigan, Idaho, Massachusetts, Arizona and soon Mormon Salt Lake City and then New York City and California. He was quite entranced by the desert.
At the time the Mormon experience was quite new for the US and a hotly debated topic. Ed visited Salt Lake in 1898 while he and Emma lived in the city for several months in 1903-04. I don’t recall that he wrote anything about Utah but Mormon religion may have figured in his religious ideas.
His contemporary, Zane Grey, who also loved the desert wrote extensively about the Mormons, indeed, his most famous novel, The Riders Of The Purple Sage discusses them. Another Mormon novel that might have influenced him was Harry Leon Wilson’s The Lions Of The Lord of 1903.
Now released from his obligation and stranded in Arizona Ed had no choice but to return to Chicago and home. To make the trip remunerative his brothers who had bought a herd of Mexican cattle employed him to attend the cows on their train ride to the slaughterhouse in Kansas City. Always inept businessmen his brothers had purchased a starving straggle of cows that gave Ed some interesting memories and experience that would figure in his novel, The Return Of The Mucker.
Once back in Chicago in 1897 Ed found a cold reception as a disturber of the peace. While ostensibly a native Chicagoan Ed had had little contact with the city since he was fourteen. He had no place of real affection in their hearts except for a few. He had lost contact with Chicago mores being placed almost on the level of an immigrant. Among the few who had memories of him was his future wife Emma Hulbert. Emma had been keeping herself for him since the incident on the corner with John. Quite remarkable since Ed had been absent from Chicago for most of the time.
However, sometime after Ed joined the Army when it appeared that he would be gone for good Emma began to be courted by one Frank Martin. Frank was serious intending Emma for his wife. I have been unable to dredge up much on Frank but he was the son of a millionaire railroad man. He was very unhappy with the return of Ed.
So, in fact were Emma’s parents who looked at Ed as a ne’er-do-well and with some justice. His recent Army escapade merely confirmed the fact in their minds. In order to encourage Frank’s suit Ed was forbade the house.
Ed was now cast adrift with no plans for the future. He didn’t realize it as yet but he had burned all bridges leading to a military career. He took a job with his father at the battery factory while making a stab at art school. He apparently saw himself as a newspaper cartoonist but finding the instruction not to his liking he dropped out deciding to return to Idaho.
His brothers were less than enthusiastic at his return. They were failing as ranchers thus having no need for Ed’s services. They bought him a stationery business in Pocatello, presumably to get him off the ranch. Ed tried very hard to enlarge the business by mail order beyond Pocatello but to no avail. Pocatello was so small one wonders how the former owner maintained the business. He liked it enough to buy the business back six months later. Ed took part in the Spring roundup then made the fateful decision to return to Chicago.
In his absence Frank Martin’s courtship of Emma seemed to be progressing well and then the bad penny turned up again. Frank tolerated the interruption until the summer of 1899 when he decided to eliminate his competition. This was when Ed’s life was bent again. His third major memory fixation. This one would make him really dingy.
Frank determined to have Ed killed. Of course one doesn’t do such things oneself, one hires others to do it. His father got the private car off the sidetrack and he, Frank and Frank’s friend R.S. Patchin invited Ed on a trip to New York with a return through Montreal and Toronto. Just like Tarzan Ed had one of those mental lapses that led him into the trap. Perhaps Tarzan‘s lapses were based on this one. (Once again, for a fuller account see my Four Crucial Years In The Life Of Edgar Rice Burroughs).
I believe that Frank hired a couple of thugs in Chicago to be in Toronto when the private car was shunted to a sidetrack. He, Patchin and Ed then went honky tonkin’ in Toronto’s red light district where the thugs accosted Ed coming out of a bar. They let him have it with a lead pipe or a sap in the forehead laying Ed out with a major gash in his forehead spewing blood every which way.
The thugs then fled while Frank and Patchin took Ed to the hospital. He was released, the train leaving immediately the next morning for the crossing into the US.
This blow was a serious one leaving Ed dazed and confused for weeks while the memory of it is repeated in every single novel he wrote. It is a major theme with innumerable variations. Tarzan has the roof of a cave fall on his head during an earthquake. That’s how the blow felt to Ed. When he had recovered his bearing sufficiently in order to thwart Martin he asked Emma to marry him which was duly done on January 31, 1900. Emma had gotten her man. Just goes to show, money isn’t everything.
The marriage must have killed Papa Hulbert who died a few weeks later. In the meantime Emma’s parents so distrusted Ed that they insisted the couple live in their house; a humiliation Ed did not soon forget. He would never invite his mother-in-law to Tarzana although his son eventually did bring his grandmother on his own. One wonders what the Hulberts might have feared from their new son-in-law that they required such close supervision.
The amazing thing about life is that one fails to see just how adventuresome it is. If 1896 to 1900 had been packed with action the next four years in his life would be no less so. Back at work at his dad’s battery factory 1901 became a year of crisis as the battery business collapsed. Ed saved the business, at least temporarily, by convincing the fire department to buy from the firm. Ed’s father probably wasn’t keeping up with battery technology so the firm continued to slowly sink.
And then Ed came down with the dreaded typhoid fever. Often a killer, Ed survived the disease but a great strain was placed on the couple’s finances. Perhaps while recuperating Ed read the new novel by Owen Wister titled The Virginian. The book revived memories of the Johnson County War in Wyoming that Ed had peripherally experienced while containing the romantic adventure of the Wilderness Honeymoon.
One can fault Ed for making the disastrous decision to seek to emulate the honeymoon by moving back to wilderness Idaho but his brain wasn’t exactly healthy. It was nearly impossible for him to think straight. He couldn’t even recognize people on the street; he suffered from excruciating headaches from sunup to late in the afternoon every day. There must have been internal bleeding with a clot on the frontal lobe from his bashing in Toronto. The typhoid attack must also have lessened his mental vigor. Whatever the reason Ed packed up all his and Emma’s belongings, put them on a train along with the dog and went back to Idaho.
The couple had no money but what they could borrow and no place to stay in Idaho. Ed put up a one room balloon shack into which he moved Emma. You didn’t need the crystal ball to realize Emma wouldn’t tolerate such primitiveness for long.
The couple’s situation was that they had forty dollars to their name, might as well have been a million miles from anywhere, no source of income, no plans to earn any and no real idea of where to go and no money to get there. God, what an unenviable situation.
Ed’s brother Harry now no longer a rancher and living alone in Parma said he would give them a place to stay across the State in that location, I hesitate to even call it a town. They had to spend the night in the station hotel. Here Ed committed the most egregious mistake of his life and the last of his major fixations. He chose to go downstairs to join a poker game in the hopes of increasing his stake. Naturally the sharpers cleaned him out. Now completely broke this was the great crisis of his marriage. While Emma still loved him, never thinking of leaving him, she completely lost confidence in him. The repercussions from this incident would sour the marriage until Ed took up with Florence in 1927 and ended the marriage seven tortured years for Emma later.
There was nothing to do in Parma. Harry got him a job on the Oregon Shortline RR in the Salt Lake yards. After spending several months there in 1904 the couple returned to Chicago. Ed was still broke, no job, no prospects and a wife to support. Could life ever look grimmer?
2.
The four key events of Ed’s life were now integral parts of memory where they subconsciously influenced his actions against his conscious will. As can be seen all four were suggestions which indeed all memory is. Thus because all information goes into the memory banks it does so as suggestion. Suggestion is how all information is received. For instance education is nothing but suggestion. It is suggestion for beneficial use, a way to manage your memories. The psychology of Ed’s period was the result of 100,000 years of accumulated educational memory. It was only in his time that it finally became possible to begin to understand how the mind functioned. That’s after 100,000 years of effort by the human mind. Ed’s work is full of speculations on psychological matters.
In 1904 at the age of twenty-nine carrying the psychological detritus of his early years and now those of his young manhood, Ed had to find his way through life.
As his youthful expectations had been disappointed leaving him with at the very least a low grade depression Ed had to figure out a way to reverse his seeming fate and regain his position as a prince among men. The question for him was how. His first choice was a military career. That avenue was closed to him because he had abandoned his post in 1896. He made a futile attempt to join the brigade of his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, when that worthy formed his Rough Riders to take part in the Spanish War of 1898. He was once again rejected. Not yet willing to give up he was ready to abandon Emma for a position in the Chinese Army of the rebel Sun Yat Sen.
Such a hope was not as far fetched as it may sound. The hunch backed near cripple Homer Lea had been recruited by Sun Yat Sen to serve as a General in China in which Lea led a column in the relief of the embassies during the Boxer Rebellion. Unfortunately Lea was the exception and not the rule. Ed was turned down. Even in the Great War Ed was willing to chuck not only Emma and the kids but his career as author to be a mere war correspondent. The soldiers life to him was obviously the highest calling. Rule out a military career for Ed.
As Ed didn’t return to his father’s business he either didn’t want to or as the business was slowly failing there was no money available to employ him. Nor did his father have the influence to get him favorable treatment from business friends. This period from 1904 to 1912 is the one of many jobs that so many writers love to recite. We are usually assured that Ed couldn’t get or keep a good job. This was not true. He changed jobs restlessly. Midway through the period he landed an executive position at Sears Roebuck in which he excelled. His salary at Sears was 250.00 per month or 3000.00 per year. This was a creditable salary. Unskilled labor was lucky to pull down 750.00 a year on which it was possible for a family to survive. Ed’s salary was enough for he and Emma to have a comfortable life while Ed was so well thought of that he might easily have advanced to the 5,000.00 to 10,000.00 class within a reasonable time. Ten thousand was enough to live as well as possible except for extravagant luxury habits. So, Ed had an escape from poverty which he consciously refused to take.
His reason, most assuredly, was that there was no redemption in a corporate identity. He couldn’t regain his position as prince. His literary characters, John Carter and Tarzan, were not only heroes and princes but nearly, if not actually, deified as gods. Sears could never offer that so Ed, certainly inexplicably to Emma, chucked the job. He did so with less than no expectations.
He said that he took up the pen as a last resort and less than honorable occupation. One presumes he meant for a warrior. Perhaps warrior was his first choice but I suspect that like his mentor, Charles King, he would have taken up the pen as a sideline to show his versatility.
In point of fact Ed had been subconsciously training himself as a writer at least since his confrontation with John. In Return of Tarzan he has that hero and jungle god sitting around the Paris library reading desultorily. Tarzan’s purpose in the library was to learn everything there was to learn. One suspects that Tarzan’s activities in Paris were a reflection of Ed’s in Chicago. As with Tarzan as Ed flipped the pages he came to the conclusion not overly sagely that it was impossible to learn everything there was to know.
Nevertheless he read away absorbing numerous novels and scientific tracts that he would put to use in his own writing. Meanwhile he had a wife to support with two new additions. In what must seem a comical interlude Ed organized a company that purported to sell some Rube Goldberg version of a pencil sharpener. Always the executive Ed wrote the sales manual and sent other poor fish out to sell the sharpeners. This idea was ridiculous to the point of stupidity but it indicates a subconscious desire.
As Ed said, while he waited for the orders to roll in he sharpened his own pencil and began to write A Princess Of Mars. Surely a joke is intended in there somewhere, subconscious, but still a joke.
The Mars novel was not his first effort. Perhaps in an attempt to organize his mind he had put down a sequence of thoughts in a novelette titled: Minidoka. There is a dispute as to whether the story was written circa 1903-05 or circa 1908-09. I opt for the later date if for no other reason than he says the story is written in Ragtime Talk. Ragtime was a hipster patois that also indicates the Ed and Emma were leading some sort of Bohemian life. This would be self-evident if he had put his Du Maurier reading to use.
Thus as 1911-12 loomed on his horizon it was do or die time. He would play his last hand as he had in Idaho in a winner takes all attempt. He wrote out the first half of A Princess Of Mars and sent it into Munsey’s All Story Magazine. He was lucky to find a receptive editor, one Metcalf, who told him to finish the story and send it in. Metcalf sent back a check for 400.00. Just to be clear this money was not peanuts. Valuation is difficult to assess but in today’s terms one might consider the sum as 30 to 40 thousand dollars. I mean, you know, a schooner of beer was only a nickel as compared to God knows how many dollars today depending on location and venue.
There would be some trying moments as Metcalf rejected his second submission but with his third Ed hit the jackpot- the character of the century- Tarzan Of The Apes. If only it had been that easy.
Part V will attempt a resume of Ed’s literary preparations from 1900 to 1912.
Pt. III: Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Accreted Personality
April 12, 2012
Edgar Rice Burroughs
And
The Accreted Personality
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs Searching For The Answers
The Sea In Which He Swam
“I will tell you my history!
And you, excellent agnostic as you are,
‘Shall minister to a mind diseased,
And pluck out the memory of a rooted sorrow!’
What a power of expression there was in Shakespeare,
The uncrowned but actual King of England!
Not the rooted sorrow alone was to be ‘plucked out’;
But the very memory of it.
The apparently simple here holds complex wisdom;
No doubt the poet knew,
Or instinctively guessed
the most terrible fact in the universe…’
“And what is that?”
“The eternal consciousness of Memory,…God cannot forget- and, in consequence of this, His creature, may not!”
Marie Corelli- The Sorrows Of Satan
Miss Marie Corelli- The Soul Of Confidence
There can be no mind without memory. While I personally believe that the unborn infant does have inchoate memories obtained in the womb, let us just say that the memory banks begin to fill with birth. With memory comes an ability to analyze, that is compare, memories. As an example when I was lying on my back in my crib looking at the room for a long time (read, a couple months ) and all I saw were incoherent geometrical forms, angles and triangles, circles and whatever one moment as I looked on in amazement these geometric forms cohered into three dimensional objects forming walls and ceilings, While I didn’t know the names for lamps and lampshades, the lamp in the corner became one. And that was by unaided instruction.
Then they stood me on my feet and my education began in earnest. From that point an infant has to memorize vast amounts of information while somehow learning how to manipulate it for use. By the time you get to school they’re cracking your brain with masses of information.
The basis of mind is memory, that is to say the mind is nearly vacant at birth like an unprogrammed computer. The matrix for memorization is there but the content has yet to be loaded. While loading a computer is a matter of minutes filling a mind takes a lifetime with the crucial years being the first twelve. Zeus in the Iliad had a mind of infinite power and it is the duty of every individual to develop the power of his mind to as close an approximation as Zeus according to his ability.
George Du Maurier
Strangely the psychologists of the period failed to realize this, although the philosopher Carus came close. Freud himself seems to ignore the basic role of memory while some novelists of the last quarter of the century grasped it. George Du Maurier’s wonderful novel, Peter Ibbetson, is a marvelous exposition on the nature of Memory. Marie Corelli’s Sorrows of Satan is likewise built on the nature of memory. In short, without memory we are nothing, without the ability to remember as a child we can amount to nothing, while in old age if we lose our memory we become a vegetable without any purpose. Our existence is really a story of how we accumulated our memories and what we did with them.
There are also kinds of Memory. Experiential memory forms the basis of which much of the content is what the nineteenth century American sociologist Graham Sumner called Folkways. The ways one’s people do and see things that we begin to acquire at birth naturally, or perhaps unconsciously. This memory is supplemented at age five or six with organized education- school. Education is a very hard and painful thing requiring periodic restructuring of the brain when enough knowledge is acquired to demand a change of scale. No wonder fair numbers of people fail this rite of passage. Education gives or should give one a means of interpreting one’s acquired knowledge and experience, hence the importance of reading, writing and arithmetic.
Matters have changed a great deal since the nineteenth century with the development of various forms of media so that the child is bombarded with propaganda that he probably can’t evaluate properly so that the pre-school years have become very dangerous to him. Burroughs didn’t have that problem.
Ed was born into the world in 1875 so that his youth and young manhood was lived in the horse and buggy world shaping his ideas of reality. This would force a severe adaptation to the changes of scale, folkways and technology after 1900. In the sense of H.G. Wells’ novel Men Like Gods the world passed through an interface into a parallel universe where horses and buggies disappeared to be replaced by motor cars and an unparalleled wonder- the airplane. I get ahead of myself. Ed’s mind had assumed its form by 1900 so let’s see, if we can, what he saw, as his memory received its input.
Today we look at his novels of lost world after lost world and sneer at it as an overused literary device. But consider:
To give it a convenient date, the Western consciousness went through a change of scale about 1795. Philip Farmer, the American sci-fi writer picked this date to begin his fictional Wold Newton Universe. The change was the beginning of what might be called speculative fiction. Mary Shelley’s influential book, Frankenstein, would possible be the earliest or very early example.
Oddly enough this very period saw the introduction of the historical novel in the works of the Scotsman, Walter Scott, perhaps the greatest novelist who ever lived. In my book he is. Thus we have a sense of the past and vision of the future emerging as the Western mind set. The historical novel itself is an exercise of racial memory so that along with the change came a realization of the racial self as well as the individual self, an expanded consciousness.
The Western mindset was changed, had been changing, the changes of which took shape during the French Revolution, preceded by the Age of Reason which melded into the scientific outlook.
Hence, when Napoleon, for whatever quixotic reason , invaded Egypt in 1799, he took along a contingent of scientists, who did not exist before that time, to catalog the wonders of that ancient civilization. This was the first of the Lost Empires to be discovered by Europeans only 76 years before Ed was born. And what a Lost Civilization. All had been hidden from Western eyes by the veil of the Moslem occupation of what were traditionally Western lands. But now, the Pyramids, Luxor, the Great Sphinx! The last was celebrated by Shelley’s mind in his great poem Ozymandias nineteen years later:.
The Great Romantic- Percy Shelley
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And whose wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my work , ye Mighty and despair!’
Nothing besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The European mind was astounded, dumbfounded, amazed beyond measure. This was also the time that the Arabian Nights or alternatively The Thousand And One Nights of Scheherazade was placed in the European canon of literature. And the Egyptian hieroglyphs, so inscrutable, concealed the mystery of this amazing ancient people that preceded the Israelites of the Bible. Yet thirty years later Champollion of France decoded the hieroglyphics and revealed their meaning to the amazement of the world.
So vast were the Egyptian treasures of memory that year by year more astounding tombs were opened, hundreds and hundreds of mummies were discovered, legend after terrifying legend revealed this amazing past until the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in the 1920’s more or less put an end to this terrific hundred and twenty year voyage through mankind’s memory. The curse of the Pharaohs haunted the Western imagination well into the thirties with many movies, the technology unheard of in 1799, exploited the fantasy. Marvel of marvels. The curse of the Pharaohs.
Heinrich Schliemann
Nor did archaeology stop in Egypt. Heinrich Schliemann, a German enthusiast, defied the experts and uncovered the site of Homer’s fabled Troy, the lost civilization of the Iliad. The Iliad that incredible legend of 800 BC turned out to be based on fact. The Greek Myths themselves shape shifted from incredible fantasies to be myths based on actual events. So actual that Schliemann leaving Troy traveled to the Argolid of Greece and unearthed the marvelous lost civilization of Mycenae, revealing a shaft tomb containing what might have been a death mask of the fabled King Agamemnon of the Iliad.
Oh yes, this is old hat to us now but imagine the gasp of astonishment then. And, it didn’t stop with Schliemann’s discoveries either. The walls of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire too were exposed to the light of day with their thousands of cuneiform tablets that once again were almost miraculously translated to reveal that amazing civilization thought to be a figment of the imagination of the Jews but now found real.
These discoveries went on an on and on. Even impoverished Africa contributed the memory of the Malagasy Empire of South Africa with its remains of Zimbabwe.
The British captains returned from India bearing tales almost too marvelous to be comprehended. Read General Forlong’s magnificent Rivers Of Life. The jungles of Southeast Asia gave up many incredible remains including Angkor Wat.
Burroughs is thought to have taken the concept of the lost civilization from that great English author Rider Haggard and while he read Haggard’s works, definitely influenced by them, he really only needed his newspaper to be astonished on, shall we say, a daily basis?
Thus year by year Ed’s memory banks filled with truths made even more incredible by having been the stuff of repressed memory for centuries even millennia.
II.
And then there was the War Between The States and Reconstruction. The Indian Wars post States Rights. How to take all this in. This was not a static period or a simpler happier time as many so fondly imagine.
Ed’s father George T. was an officer in the Civil War serving from the first Bull Run to Lee’s surrender at Appomatox. While soldiers don’t like to talk about their experiences surely little Eddie must have gotten some stories while the Grand Old Army of the Republic, the GAR, would have been prominent marching in parades and having a general political presence at a time when the politicians waved the bloody shirt as having fought.
Ed himself was born two years before the crime of Reconstruction, with all it attendant horrors for the Southerners, so while not having any real memories of the period he would have been aware of it as the following Jim Crow period developed. Romancing the South was prominent through the First World War dissipating in the twenties and thirties and disappearing after WWII. On his 1916 cross country auto tour on which Ed took a portable record player along one of three songs he played over and over was Jack Yellin’s Are You From Dixie?, a favorite of mine. Yellin himself was a Lithuanian Jew who came to the country at five in 1900 and by 1915 was able to write a song reflecting the feeling of the country such as this:
Jack Yellin- Master Songwriter
Hello there Stranger, how do you do,
There’s something’ I want to say to you,
You seem surprised that I recognize
I’m no detective I just surmise,
You’re from the place that I’m longing to be,
Your smiling face just seems to say to me,
You’re from my homeland, my sunny homeland,
Tell me, can it be?
Are you from Dixie, I say from Dixie, where the fields of cotton beckon to me,
I’m glad to see you, tell me, I’ll be you and the friend I’m longin’ to see.
Are you from Alabama, Tennessee or Caroline
Any place below that Mason-Dixon line.
Are you from Dixie, I say from Dixie, ‘cause I’m from Dixie too.
It was way back in old ‘89,
When I first crossed that Mason-Dixon line,
Gee, but I long to return
To those good old folks I left behind.
My home was way down in ol’ Alabam’
On a plantation close to Birmingham,
And there’s one thing for certain, I’m surely flirtin’
With those southbound trains.
Pretty incredible for someone who probably still spoke with a Jewish accent. Goes to show how pervasive the sentimental vision of the South was. The Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris kept the vision alive until it ended shortly after WWII when Walt Disney produced his remarkable Song Of The South. That movie is now banned because Negro objectors wish to deprive us of our cultural heritage even though the movie presented Blacks as so adorable you just had to love them running counter to all the facts as evidenced today.
Ed’s attitude is probably best expressed in the War Between The States/Reconstruction novels of the great Thomas Dixon Jr. and reinforced by D.W. Griffiths’ great movie The Birth Of A Nation.
The Great Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.
Because Dixon points out several unpalatable facts about Northern conspirators who fomented the War and almost certainly conspired to assassinate Lincoln after the War because he wouldn’t crucify the Southern Aryans and attempted to impeach Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson for the same reason, who also resisted their villainous genocidal schemes. Dixon has been slandered to the point of being a veritable non-person, however he wrote very good novels. His diptych The Southerner and The Victim about Lincoln and Jefferson Davis respectively is really must reading for the period.
So John Carter of the Mars series was a Virginian as well as most of Ed’s heroes while he also translates his ’father’ from the Union ranks to those of Virginia. Probably based on memories of Massachusetts’ Phillips Academy he invariably excoriates New Englanders.
Ed’s memories of the War and Reconstruction while learned second hand were a very important part of his mental furniture.
III.
Not inferior to Lost Civilizations and the Civil War to Ed’s mind were the very exciting events of the Scramble For Africa of the last quarter of the century. The Scramble of the European States for colonies in Africa also involved the stories of the searches for Livingston and the sources of the Nile, H.M. Stanley, Richard Burton, and King Leopold of the Congo Free State and many, many exciting stories, real life adventures and adventurers that wouldn’t be believable is they weren’t documented. The imaginary adventures of John Carter on Mars pale before them. I’m sure the character of Carter owes more to them than has been recognized. Certainly the Tarzan adventures couldn’t have been written except for the memory of these great explorers and the events of the Scramble which ended only a few years before Ed began writing.
King Leopold- Man Of Destiny
The incredible story of King Leopold of Belgium is certainly one of the most amazing stories of all time. Originally the Congo was not a colony of Belgium but the personal property, private domain of Leopold, thus Tarzan’s claim to hegemony of all Africa. In addition to the Congo Leopold annexed Katanga while also acquiring Rwanda-Burundi and almost the whole of the Southern Sudan otherwise known as the Anglo-Egyptian province of Equatoria. Unlike most of the other colonies, once the bicycle and its wheel was developed, the discovery of rubber in the Congo made the Congo a cash cow.
Rubber at that time was collected in the wild, later grown on plantations in various locations, then replaced by synthetic rubber made from garbage during WWII. The methods of collecting the rubber were brutal as the Negroes were forced to search the wilds and punished in they didn’t make their quota.
While it’s true that Leopold sanctioned this, Whites anywhere in Africa regressed from civilization to the level of native cannibals. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness was based on a real person. Thus the French in what became French Equatorial Africa were guilty of as heinous crimes as those in the Congo but Leopold took the brunt of the criticism. The Congo Free State was given to Belgium as a gift after the turn of the century. The Tarzan series thus is a memory of the period. The attitude prospered until the thirties when realities obviated the colonial past.
In the post-MGM series of Tarzan pictures filmed by Sol Lesser all the stories take place in Lost Civilizations while the actors, savages and all are White, no Black Africans at all.
Sol Lesser- Tarzan Producer
IV.
Another building block of memory not inferior to the others was the development of science in the nineteenth century. The key event for Ed Burroughs was the introduction of Evolution by Charles Darwin in 1959. Ed uses several strands of biology in his corpus. He knows the earlier work of Lamarck as well as that of Darwin and later evolutionary contributions of Gregor Mendel and the germ theory of August Weismann and his contribution of the Weismann Barrier that Ed apparently rejected.
Thus contrary to the popular conception that Burroughs was some sort of idiot savant. He kept up on current developments well aware of the Curries’ discovery of radium when he began to write. The awareness of radium poisoning was not yet known as he seems to be unaware of it.
Although it is not generally accepted he was also very well informed on the development of psychology. There is no reason that he couldn’t have known of Charcot while he was well up on hypnotism, an essential part of Charcot‘s method. Psychology before Freud preempted the discipline which was a fairly broad loosely defined subject. The field was also open to any and all investigators not yet preempted by the medical profession.
While it is generally believed that Freud discovered or invented the unconscious, this is not so; he merely defined the unconscious to suit his purposes and then by dint of shouting loudly and continuously managed to impose his view as orthodox driving all other understandings off the field. In fact he managed to make his interpretation, almost fabrication of psychoanalysis, the gold standard of psychology.
Sigmund Freud- Dream Weaver
Psychology was split off from philosophy rather late gaining momentum only during the eighteen eighties.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The most significant aspect of psychology that Ed exploited was that of the split personality which
Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde
he embraced to an astonishing degree. He seems to have gotten the notion from Robert Louis Stevenson’s great little novelette, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson got there before H.G. Wells or otherwise Wells would likely have appropriated the genre as well as interplanetary warfare, vivisection, invisibility, time travel and futuristic dystopias, all of which were of inestimable influence on the plastic memory of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
While Ed certainly tried to out-wow these amazing writers perhaps the closest he came was the little recognized story, The Eternal Lover, the title of which is often changed to the Eternal Savage, which completely misses the point. This story was even answered by Kipling and Haggard in their Love Eternal. Eddie was moving in fast company.
He was familiar with many novelists writing in psychological genres including George Du Maurier with his three incredible novels, William Morris of Notes From Nowhere fame and several other interesting but not compelling novels, as well as, I believe, some few novels of Marie Corelli who was working the psychological memory games.
Thus, by the time Ed began writing in earnest in 1911-12 he had a well defined notion of contemporary psychology. One must always bear in mind that Ed read continually and was omnivorous in his choice of reading material. While not of the University he had the more random reading habits of the autodidact.
V.
Having two remaining topics of memory to cover, literature and immigration I think I’ll deal with that of literature first saving immigration for last.
The nineteenth century was the unfolding of the Aryan mind, an age of self-realization and the beginning of the effort to attain full consciousness. This is the story of psychology from then to now. The search for awareness was carried on in medical circles, philosophical circles and literary circles. Psychology was transferred from philosophy into medicine and science in the last half of the century. The quest for awareness was no more prominent than in literature. The German Romantics were the first in the field to explore the nature of the mind. Men like E.T.A Hoffman, La Motte De La Fouque and Charles Nodier represented psychological ideas in their fiction. These are significant but overlooked works.
Friedrich De La Motte Fouque- Wonderful Novels
There have always been stories and storytellers. First in poetic form then evolving into prose. The Greek novels of the Hellenic period are just great. Papryus was expensive and copying by hand was laborious and also expensive. With the invention of paper and moveable typeface and the printing press, books became more economical and multiple copies into the hundreds or thousands feasible. This meant that more people of diverse backgrounds could find their way into print. The key form of expression was poetry but prose gained ground. Then in the mid-eighteenth century the modern novel form took shape to explode after 1795.
Sir Walter Scott- Number One
Perhaps the first great novelist was Walter Scott who, himself began as a poet. His long poems such as The Lady Of The Lake and Marmion are still great reading although out of style along with Scott himself. What do I care about what’s out of style? Do you? Nevertheless Scott became the model for such mid-century greats as Alexandre Dumas, Balzac and Eugene Sue.
Scott and the great French novelists were also influenced by the Gothic novelist Mrs. Ann Radcliffe who wrote her romances in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
There are a myriad of authors, now forgotten except by the scholar or enthusiast who seeks their charm. George Borrow while an eccentric turned out a few worthwhile novels, Thomas, Peacock, Pierce Egan, G.W.M. Reynolds Mysteries Of The Court Of London is a fabulous five thousand page, ten volume novel of the period. Everything you’ll ever need to know. Charles Dickens and all the great novelists of the mid century wrote scores of interesting worthwhile novels now nearly slipped through memory. Of course there is only time and room in the mind of we moderns who are bombarded daily by radio, songs, film and TV plus tens of thousand of books appearing annually, for so many old books. The need for selection is paramount while the changing social and political situations are relegating the world of pre-9/11 to the historical dust bin. Still the treasures are there buried like Long John Silver’s gold for those who care to dig. Let’s hope you’re one.
As I have noted, after Darwin in 1859 and the rise of psychological sensibilities, of which Darwin was ignorant, changed for the upcoming generation who took the stage in the eighties. The great modern genres were in embryo. Jules Verne had already begun his scientific romances that were influential while he continued writing into the twentieth century. His books are now heavily bowdlerized because his acute observations of the reality he perceived are no long thought proper by our modern social Mrs. Grundys.
Camille Flammarion, the very great French scientific neo-romantic writer made the space travel and planetary romance popular beginning in the sixties at the same time as Verne.
In 1880 Percy Gregg published Across The Zodiac which is erroneously credited as the first Martian romance beginning the long fascination with the Red Planet for which Burroughs was for so long credited. It was in the mid-eighties that a major influence of Ed’s began to publish and continued to publish at the rate of two or three volumes a year for nearly forty years, the great, wonderfully imaginative Henry Rider Haggard. A most versatile writer now known mainly for his African novels as the Scramble was in process. Haggard also wrote a half dozen great ancient Egyptian lost civilization romances that are well worth reading along with a couple Hebrew volumes of the Roman wars that are exceptional. It appears that Ed read most or all of Haggard.
The year after Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Stevenson published his great scientific psychological thriller, Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. A key fact for Ed’s mental development is that these novels that are considered classics today were published during Ed’s lifetime or the decade or two before his birth so these really startling and amazing novels were as fresh in their impact as, say, a Rolling Stones record in the sixties and seventies. One imagines schoolboys gathering in knots and talking about them excitedly, much as we did about the latest sci-fi pieces in the fifties. While we know that Burroughs read these books we can’t be sure when but I imagine that to have read these books he must have done most of them close to the publishing date or they couldn’t have been part of his mental furniture by the time he began to write in 1911-12. And he had a lot of reading to do.
The Sherlock Holmes of Conan Doyle who began his career in 1886 also which continued intermittently for twenty-five years or so dazzling Ed’s mind. Doyle as I see it was also dealing with a split personality. Holmes and his alter ego are essentially two aspects of the same personality. Watson belongs to the pre-scientific past while Holmes is the scientific thinking machine devoid of sympathy. Watson takes the sentimental side. In addition Doyle introduces a third personality element in the criminal mastermind Moriarty who is a sort of Hyde to Holmes Jekyll, hence his is the social negative to Holmes positive.
Jekyll and Hyde and Holmes and Watson were introduced in the same year of 1886 as Marie Corelli’s Wormwood that also deals with the splitting of personality. As these books couldn’t have been influenced by each other one has to assume that the notion of split or multiple personality was being bruited about. Corelli seems to have attended Charcot’s demonstrations so that all psychological roads lead back to the Salpetriere.
There is no clear evidence that Burroughs read Corelli but as she was among the best selling and most sensational authors of the period I have little doubt myself that Ed followed his unerring instincts at least sampled her work.
Another author plowing the same furrow that Burroughs read for sure was George Du Maurier whose first novel, once again dealt with a split personality. In his novel, Peter Ibbetson of 1891, his character has a childhood in France which was very happy. Through the death of his parents he was sent to an uncle in England who while providing generously for Peter’s education nevertheless was cold while being disgusted at Peter’s rejection of his ideas of manhood. Peter’s glowing childhood expectations were dashed throwing him into a deep depression. Now let’s catch up on Burroughs’ development and I’ll return to Du Maurier later in another context.
Mark Twain
Now, Burroughs’ loved three novels that he read and reread six or seven times by 1920. They were Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Ed was led unerringly to the three novels that dealt most explicitly with his mental fixations. The first two were published during Burroughs’ childhood while the last was published shortly after the turn of the century in 1902.
Two of these three books relate to Burroughs life from birth to age twenty in 1896 with the last relating to the next period. One’s favorite books, songs or music are always going to relate to psychological needs developed during your early years. You may or may not have realized their psychological importance. It can’t be said whether Ed knew why the books were his favorites or not. All three relate to the blighted hopes of his youth. As far as I can recall all of Ed’s books tell the same story as these three in variation.
All three tell of a young prince who is disinherited and then after a series of adventures comes into his own again. In Twain’s Prince And The Pauper we have the double, or split personality of the Prince and the Pauper. Identical in appearance. By some literary magic the two exchange places with the Prince trading roles with the Pauper. In the end the Prince reassumes his proper role.
In Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy one has the boy who is the son of a Lord, thus being a little Prince, growing up in America in straitened circumstance who then is discovered and comes into his inheritance and true identity. He has a sort of double in a newsboy who follows him to England before moving to California where he becomes the successful manager of a ranch thus foreshadowing Ed’s flirtation with and move to California where he bought the Tarzana estate.
The Virginian of 1902 does not properly belong to his childhood but follows the same theme with the addition that the hero meets his true love and has an idyllic wilderness honeymoon. Shortly after reading the book he took his young wife Emma West to Idaho in what seems like an attempt to live the book. Emma was the wrong girl and the wilds of Idaho the wrong place.
It would seem then that Ed was highly influenced by what he read. He was also able to retain an accurate remembrance of the stories in his memory. The period from 1896 to 1911 was also filled with literature that furnished his mind for the literary tasks ahead of him.
So, in addition to the truly great literature of Dumas and Sue, Verne and Haggard, he was drawn to the interplanetary adventure. Like Freud who appropriated the long history of the Unconscious to himself so Burroughs absorbed and transcended the thirty years or so of previous interplanetary adventure to himself. Just as one erroneously thinks Freud invented the unconscious so one thinks Ed Burroughs invented the Martian interplanetary romance. No so. Earlier examples are constantly being discovered. At this time the earliest Martian novel is considered to be the one by Percy Gregg entitled Across The Zodiac published in 1880.
Greggs’s novel is written in the high Victorian style reminiscent of Anthony Trollope or just any of the crop of English writers of the 1820 or so generation so that the emphasis is sort of pre-scientific and stuffy unlike Burroughs’ writing which began after the invention of cars and airplanes, movies, phones and the whole works. Probably for that reason Burroughs displaced all other Martian writers with the exception of H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds. Even that which was on the edge between the Victorian and Edwardian periods relates more to the past than to the future.
There is a question as to which of these books Ed may have read. I think it not improbable that if he had heard of them he would have sought them out. Nor would, say, Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac be as obscure in Ed’s day as it is now. There would have been not a few people who were familiar with such a book to refer Ed to it. As an inveterate magazine and newspaper reader there is no reason he might not have come across a reference. After all he did read Popular Science and Popular Mechanics both of which originated in the last quarter of the century. So, while it cannot be said for certain I think it probable that he was familiar with most of the Martian literature so that when he began A Princess Of Mars he knew what the landscape should and shouldn’t look like and knew what to avoid.
He was early introduced to the idea of the double and multiple personality through Jekyll And Hyde. The book was a clear cut example of split personality. The puzzle of a divided personality fascinated Ed while the literature of the subject is fairly extensive with numerous writers discussing it in various manners of doubling. From 1886 to 1900 many outstanding examples appeared that given Ed’s attraction to the sensational he would definitely have heard of while when reading those works and Ed’s works the same themes and even details are recurrent in both. Thus, while I have never read of Marie Correli’s name being mentioned in connection with Ed’s work she manages that same dark, murky sensibility in connection with personality dissociations. She was one of the best selling authors from 1886 to 1900 so there is no chance Ed hadn’t heard of her.
While he may have read Corelli it is certain that he read all three of the novels of George Du Maurier- Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian.
The first, Peter Ibbetson, 1891, follows Ed’s usual formula of a happy childhood disrupted by an untoward event. In this case having been brought up in France, his parents died and he was sent to an uncle to be brought up in England, thus a personality divided by French and English identities with the latter unhappy.
Now, Du Maurier concentrates on the need for memories. As he says, quite rightly, without memories what is a man. Nothing. Just a vegetable. Ibbetson, then, chronicles his childhood French memories while abhorring his current English situation. The crisis comes when Uncle Ibbetson insults Peter’s mother; Peter then murders his uncle.
Before he did Peter meets his childhood sweetheart, Mimsy, now married as Mary, the Duchess Of Towers. The childhood affection was sincere but she is now a married woman. Peter would have been hanged for the murder except for the intervention of Mary and her powerful friends and then is given life without parole.
Before Freud appropriated the topic for his own ends the Unconscious was thought to be a source of great intellectual riches with incredible paranormal, that is to say supernatural powers. At the same time dreams were improperly understood while also thought to have paranormal powers attached to them. Du Maurier invented something called Dreaming True while at the time Lucid Dreaming was a hot topic. Lucid Dreaming is when you consciously invade your dreams without waking and direct the dream’s course. Robert Louis Stevenson, who died in 1894, said that he wrote many of his stories while dreaming lucidly. They read like it too. Ed Burroughs, also, was interested in Dreaming True and Lucid Dreaming and said that he too took his stories from his dreams. If you read Burroughs with Lucid Dreaming in mind you can trace those influences too.
So, and now this seemed possible at the time and may seem possible to some today, Peter and Mary agreed to establish mental contact and Dream True. That is to say that they would each enter into one another’s dream together. This they succeeded in doing thus each led a double life. Now, in the very nature of things, they could not dream of anything that was not in their memories. Thus, they could only dream for instance of chairs they had seen, places they had been, only that of which they had memories. Du Maurier intuited that mind was wholly memory. Nothing comes out that didn’t go in.
As they had read of prehistory they could travel back through time into prehistoric situations. Everything went well for twenty-five years until one day the dreamgate was closed. Peter couldn’t enter from his end. His worst fears were realized. Mary had died.
His disappointment unbalanced his mind so that he went insane. He was removed from the prison to the asylum, his memories in disorder. I suppose Du Maurier meant shizophrenic in which one’s memories are so painful they became confused, working against each other so that the mind can’t function properly.. Over time he became reconciled to the reality and regained the use of his memories. And then one night while Dreaming True he sat by a dream river when Mary, released from heaven as a very special dispensation, appeared to him, explained the situation and told him they would meet in heaven.
The second novel, Trilby, one of the most celebrated of its time deals with the iconic hypnotist, Svengali, evil but potent, who exploited Trilby, a memory creation Du Maurier borrowed from the novel of the same name by Nodier, the Romantic. Hypnotism will play a significant role in Ed’s work. And finally the third novel, The Martian, inspired Ed, and his mind focused on Mars.
Du Maurier’s Dreaming True meshed with Stevenson’s Lucid Dreaming as a source for obtaining material unconsciously. It is clear that Ed was heavily influenced by Stevenson having read most if not all his fiction. It seems probable that he would have read articles about his hero who spoke freely of his Lucid Dreaming technique. Thus when Ed said he found his stories in his dreams there is no reason not to believe that he was familiar with these dream theories and their source in the unconscious.
The Fantastic E.T.A. Hoffman
Lin Carter believed and I concur that Ed also read novels by William Morris of News From Nowhere fame who writes dreamlike stories bearing some relationship to those of Ed.
I intend to pause at 1900 continuing on with Ed’s life experiences to 1911, but to close on this theme, this next book appeared shortly after 1900 but is very much a product of the pre-industrial period before 1900 so I include it here.
In England during the last quarter of the century the spiritualist movement gravitated from the US to England and even Germany where it was treated as a science to be investigated, hence the plethora of novels like those of Du Maurier and Marie Corelli.
Not only was the unconscious thought of as a repository for multiple personalities but even the fantastic notion of past lives. Thus people sprang up who believed, or said they did, that they could remember previous incarnations. This notion was also helped along by the appearance of Hindu and Buddhist missionaries in Britain and the US with their notions of reincarnation.
Among these imposters was a Swiss woman using the name of Helene Smith whose supposed lives were recorded by the psychologist Theodore Flournoy. Now, he conducted a serious scientific investigation of the woman’s claims. That Flournoy could allow himself to be so deluded demonstrates the psychological novelty of the Unconscious.
Miss Smith was a shop girl who was much displeased with her situation so she began to fantasize. Using the spiritualist movement as a stepping stone Flournoy made her famous. She would have done much better to turn her fantasies into novels much like Ed would but she enjoyed the attention her past lives claims got her. She chose three past identities, one as an Indian Princess, another as a Martian and the third as Marie Antoinette. Of interest here is that she invented a Martian vocabulary that only she could translate. Burroughs himself followed a few years later with his own vocabularies of various provenance including African Ape, the first and once universal language.
There is no reason to go into the details of her debunking, the point here is that it is thought that Ed read Flournoy’s account: From India To The Planet Mars. Certainly he would create three ‘past lives’ as identities to explore his own fantasies- Mars, an imaginary Africa and the Earth’s Core. The late life Venus stories can be discounted. By c. 1900 then the foundations of his novels had already entered his memory banks where they bubbled under his conscious mind where he could work on them both consciously and unconsciously letting them slowly ferment.
Terminating the nineteenth century were two works by the deviser of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. The first was his Interpretation Of Dreams and the other, The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life. The true significance of these books are overlooked but they both deal with the primacy of Memory as the basis of mind. Reminiscences as he would say.
As Freud noted that the problem hysterics suffered was not biologic but the distortion of memories or reminiscences, so both his two volumes deal with the distortion of Memory in ‘normal’ people. Freud must have thought he was normal as he used himself as a subject in both books.
As Freud grasped, dreams are based not only on memories but the distortion of memory by one’s fixations. That is, a fixation of a memory too hurtful to face so that it is fixated in the form of the hurt from which point it constellates similar subsequent memories and even shapes them and one’s actions to conform to its fears. So, from reminiscences of hysterics Freud had moved on to the memories of dreams and parapraxes.
Even more prescient was the study that followed a couple years later: The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life. The book is ill-titled, being somewhat off putting although very easy reading, but of even more significance than his dream book. This was the study that gave rise to the term ‘Freudian slip’. It is a study of parapraxes and how one’s memory interferes with another memory to blot it out. Strangely Freud missed the import of the significance of Memory taking it more or less for granted.
Freud’s analysis of parapraxes such as forgetting a word you commonly use was superb. He demonstrates significantly, from his own example, how unpleasant memories that one might associate with a word cancels out the ability to recall the word. In other instances one means to say one thing but let out one’s true intent by saying another.
Thus the subconscious whether in dream distortion or waking distortion affects one’s life, clashing with the conscious. The memories one has, the subconscious, one’s true desires emerge against one’s will. Of course, practice can eliminate or reduce word substitutions which is done by sharpening one’s conscious efforts to deny entrance to the sub- or Unconscious. In the struggle to unify one’s consciousness, that is, as Freud would put it, have your ego fill the space occupied by the Id- a later name for the Unconscious one must eliminate the interface. The only successful method is to integrate one’s consciousness so that the mind functions as one unit however perfectly or imperfectly. This is rare but it can be done by searching for and recognizing the significance of one’s fixations. Forget the term Depth Psychology; that’s a misnomer.
Barring that the choice is to recognize the influence of the unconscious and try to pose an impervious barrier to its influence in the sense of W.E. Henley’s famous poem, Invictus (The Unconquerable) Henley wrote the poem in 1875 although the title was added later by an editor, so that one may be sure that Ed knew the poem and used it as bedrock as so many of us have. There are interpretations, I give mine:
W.E. Henley
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance,
My head is bloody but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul.
There is a temporal interpretation as well as a psychological one. I am interested in the latter. D.H. Lawrence is quoted by Rudiger Gorner in his essay ‘The Hidden Agent Of The Soul’: “The novels and poems come unnoticed out of one’s pen.” This is true. One has conscious intentions but as one writes trancelike, hidden meanings emerge from the pen allowing for different interpretations of the words. Whether Henley had a conscious understanding of the unconscious psychological meaning of his words, the psychological interpretation fits. That’s all I can say.
‘Out of the night that covers me…’ In Greek mythology the night is construed as female, that is, the unconscious, the unknown, as with the depths of the sea, another female symbol. Daylight was considered as conscious and male as one can clearly see. The Night, is uncertainty and darkness when the goblins come out. It was feared. Henley clearly interprets night that way: …black as the pit from pole to pole. In other words he is in the grip of the unconscious with not a glimmer of light from one end to the other, he might have added, and from East to West.
But Henley is defiant of the darkness. He thanks whatever gods may be for his unconquerable soul. In other words, come what may he will not tamely submit. ‘Black as the pit…’ In my own hour of darkness, one of them, in my own hour of need, sometime in my teens, I gathered courage from Henley’s pen to fight that mountain of despair. I’m sure that Burroughs did too.
‘In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeoning of chance, my head is bloody but unbowed.’ I’m not sure of the wincing but I have been strong enough not to cry out loud. Henley had his problems. He contracted tuberculosis of the bone and at seventeen had a leg removed at the knee. The doctors wished to take his other leg too but Henley stoutly refused. Thus he lost a leg but rather than succumb to despair his ‘head was bloody but unbowed’ under the ‘bludgeoning of chance.’
The first two stanzas were all there was of significance for me at the time while, for myself, I have considered it a two stanza poem but it continues with Henley’s rejection of the gods and of heaven and hell, both subconscious projections. ‘Beyond this place of wrath and tears, looms but the horror of the shade’. I interpret shade as nothingness. ‘And yet the menace of the years find, and shall find me, unafraid.’ A fine show of bravado just in case. Henley certainly spoke for Burroughs and I suspect for a great many of you, us.
And then a dismissal of consequences: It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll… It don’t bother me none, he says. And why? Here comes the clincher, that line that gets ya, because: I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. Damn right! And that’s called Positive Mental Attitude. Life isn’t worth living without it.
So Ed hangs in there, head bloody but unbowed, waiting for the turning of the tide. As the proverb goes: It’s a long road without a turning.
In closing this part let me remark that Ed was very fond of popular poetry of the Kipling kind. For those interested, I’m sure someone may be, there is a compilation called The Best Loved Poems Of The American People compiled by Hazel Felleman first published in 1936, in print since then, of which every poem I am sure was known to Burroughs. A poem couldn’t be too schmaltzy for him, he even has the collected Edgar A. Guest in his library. These bits of poetry were as essential to furnishing his memory as anything else he read.
VI.
The history of immigration in the US is the least understood and most misrepresented topic in US history. The history of immigration has invariably been written by Liberals or immigrants themselves so the story as taught in schools is rather one sided. The Key text is Gustavus Myers The History Of Bigotry In The United States. If you’ve read that you’ve got the official story. Just for the record, on my mother’s side I’m Polish and Pennsylvania Dutch; on my father’s side solid Scotch-Irish from the Kentucky hill country, both grand parents. I’m a hillbilly boy with a Polish accent. My name, Prindle, is usually thought of as English so I have the field covered. I have been subject to the all the discrimination currently employed against the English.
In discussing Ed’s point of view he thought of himself as pure English while on his father’s side he was English with an Irish admixture and on his mother’s side, Pennsylvania Dutch. Amusingly in the twenties he wrote his mother-in-law asking for Emma’s genealogy. Mrs. Hulbert, aware of Ed’s vanity on the issue, sniffed that Emma was English on both sides.
The first immigration problem was, of course, the Irish and if I may say so, with good reason. I rather favor the Know Nothing side of the argument. The animosity during Ed’s youth between English and Irish was intense. Apropos of Ed and John the Bully who was Irish I think the following probable. The Burroughs had two Irish maids, young women, before whom I suspect Ed put on airs about being English and therefore superior to the Irish. I think this got on the girls’ nerves so that they got an Irish kid to terrorize Ed and put him in his place. Otherwise I don’t see John waiting on a corner for a kid four years his junior who he couldn’t possibly have known. The consequences were more than the girls could have imagined.
After the Irish came the Socialists of the failed Revolution of ‘48- The Forty-eighters, another of Ed’s bete-noirs. Mostly German they contributed to Ed’s disgust of Germans when he saw them marching through Chicago under their red flag. The Haymarket Riot of 1887 also made a big impression on him especially as his father attended their execution.
Up to 1871, post-Civil War immigration had been Northern European which was thought to be compatible with the Old Stock, at least in retrospect. Prior to the Civil War, industry in the US had been more or less of the cottage variety, recalled by Longfellow in ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stood…’ But, with the invention of the steam engine on steel rails in 1830 a much larger scale of industry was required. Bessemer process steel, rolling mills and what all that also called for a greater concentration of labor.
To obtain that the industrialists moved further East into Europe recruiting from other than Nordics. At the same time the Jews of the Pale (the prototypical ’Eastern European’) discovered America quickly advancing from a trickle of immigration to a flood. Thus during Ed’s youth the character of Chicago changed year by year, unnoticeable consciously until the Great War. Then in the nineties the Italians added the US to their migratory circle. For at least a hundred years the Sicilians had been migrant labor in Europe, going North during the summer and returning South in winter.
Their first Western addition was Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. In the days of sail the circuit lasted a year or two as they could follow the sun North into Brazil, and Central America. With the reliability of steamships it was possible for them to return home more frequently and cheaply in steerage. Then in the nineties the Sicilians discovered New York and the US, which they added to their circuit.
They were never true immigrants being more of what were disparagingly called Birds Of Passage. They came for the money. In most years prior to the Great War nearly as many returned to Sicily as arrived. The Great War stranded them in the US but post-war Mussolini still considered them Italian citizens and so did they.
The Americans, never a very realistic people, believed that all these immigrants were on the same political and psychological wavelength as themselves, hence that the immigrants would assimilate overnight. The world war was an eye opener when all loyalties overrode American sympathies. A howl of pain went up from Teddy Roosevelt when he realized the reality and exclaimed against the ‘American boarding house.’
Of course, the history books tell it quite differently but, in fact, there was as much sympathy as not for Germany. Not everyone saw the English as innocent. The Irish who sided with the Germans in both wars were on the side of whoever was fighting England, hence if the US officially sided with England they were less than loyal to the New Island.
Chicago itself during Burroughs’ time as now had a remarkably low percentage of Old Stock, on the order of only 15 to 20%. So the babel of other tongues and accents must have offended him more than they did John Rocker of our time who was sent back to the minors for observing the fact in New York City. The second Black List one might say, but unbacked by a rehearsed voice of objection such as the Communists had in the forties and fifties.
Ed had his prejudices as every man must, Old Stock, immigrant or what. He observed the Revolutionary activity in Eastern Europe with a wry eye taking the side of neither the Jews or Russians. He definitely added the Russians to the Germans as objects of distaste. The villains of the first four Tarzan novels would be Russian. The early novels have been heavily censored so his attitude toward the Jews requires early editions to unravel. There appears to be no animosity to them but as an anti-religionist he had to find their religious beliefs as ridiculous as any of the three Semitic religions. There doesn’t seem to be any problem with the Jews until they caused it in the aftermath of the War but that’s slightly in the future and will be dealt with at that time.
It is enough to say that Ed was proudly Anglo-Saxon as he should have been and that whatever his beliefs on immigration he endured the immigrant nations stoically. At present there is no evidence that he took an aggressive stance toward them as many of his countrymen did. But, listen, I was in the orphanage and I have a very good idea of what aggression is and it didn’t just come the Old Stock. My immigrant brothers were in there too. We were told to take the alleys and stay off the city streets or take a beating. These were seven, eight and nine year kids these grown men were threatening and some of the kids did take a beating although I never did. I know where discrimination is at. So what.
Part IV will continue Ed’s temporal life from 1886 to 1911-12. Part V will review his reding from 1900 to 1920. Part VI will pick up from where Burroughs Rides the Rocket Pt. I left off. There will probably be four or more additional parts but I don’t have blocked out yet.
Part II: Only The Strong Survive
April 3, 2012
Only The Strong Survive
Part II
An Examination Of Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid
As Created By Edgar Rice Burroughs
(Alternate Title: The Oakdale Affair)
by
R.E. Prindle
Part II
Into The Mysteries
(Some capitalization appears in the text that has no significance. For some reason it just showed up. I didn’t do it)
Young Burroughs With His Camera Eye
Burroughs does a good job in the Holmesian sense in this book enclosing mysteries within mysteries. The central mystery is who is committing the crime wave in Oakdale. Having learned from his mentor, Conan Doyle, Burroughs skillfully withholds details to enhance the suspense then disclosing them to reveal the mysteries. The organization of the scheme of crimes gradually unfolds to show that the real Oskaloosa Kid is one of the perpetrators. So we have a clever doubling of a sweet girl posing as the vicious criminal The Oskaloosa Kid. This is obviously a transfer of his Anima identity from the male De Vac/Oskaloosa Kid to the resumption of a female identity for his Anima through the fake Oskaloosa Kid/Gail Prim.
The girl who was seen with the criminals could have been Gail since she had disappeared without a trace never having arrived at her destination. Gail was not the girl seen with Reginald Paynter, who was robbed and murdered, and the crooks. That person was Hettie Penning who was ejected from the car speeding past the abandoned Squibbs place by the real Oskaloosa Kid. Thus symbolically De Vac/Oskaloosa Kid returns his Anima to Bridge/Burroughs.
As indicated Hettie Pening represents the dead early Anima of Burroughs who has here been resurrected. As in all cases of Burroughs representation of his failed Anima she appears to be a ‘bad’ girl but in reality is merely misunderstood. He compensates for himself.
Bridge himself is a mystery man and double. He is a hobo but with great manners and an excellent education. He is definitely a member of the Might Have Seen Better Days Club. The real club was organized by Burroughs when he served as an enlisted man in the Army in 1896.
In this case Bridge is in actuality the son of a wealthy Virginia aristocrat who has left home because he prefers a life on the road. In the framing story of a Princess of Mars Burroughs portrays himself in his own name as a Virginian. In reality Burroughs was declassed at eight or nine by John the Bully and by his father’s subsequent shuffling of him from school to school finally sending him to a bad boy school that Burroughs describes as little more than a reformatory for rich kids.
If one looks at his career he was on the move quite a bit. During his marriage he seldom lived in one house for more than a year or two then moved on.
Just as Bridge will assume his proper identity at the end of the novel so through his writing Burroughs has abandoned the shame of his hard scrabble years from 1905-13. In a sense he is assuming his proper identity with this novel.
Bridge and the Kid joining together at the fork in the road, one is reminded of Yogi Berra’s quip: When you come to a fork in the road, take it, in this case the less traveled dirt road.
I read word for word frequently dwelling on the scenes created. Burroughs is a very visual writer. Standing at the fork in a driving Midwest summer lightning, thunder and deluge storm they can hear the pursuing hoboes shouting down the road. Ahead of them is a dark unknown and a house haunted by the victims of a sextuple murder.
Indeed, Burroughs describes almost a descent into hell, or at least, the hell of the subconscious.
Over a low hill they followed the muddy road and down into a dark and gloom ravine. In a little open space to the right of the road a flash of lightning, followed one imagines by either the crash of deep loud rumbling of the thunder of perhaps if over head the sonic boom of the air splitting and closing, revealed the outline of a building a hundred yards (that’s three hundred feet, a very large front yard) from the rickety and decaying fence which bordered the Squibb farm and separated it from the road.
There are those who say Burroughs doesn’t write well but in a short paragraph he has economically drawn a verbal picture which is quite astonishing in its detail. The house is a hundred yards from the road. In the rain and muck that might be a walk or two or three minutes or more.
A clump of trees surrounded the house, their shade adding to the utter blackness of the night.
That’s what one calls inspissating gloom. One might well ask how any shade can add to utter blackness but one gets the idea. There is some intense writing thoroughly reminiscent of Poe but nothing like him.
The two had reached the verandah when Bridge, turning, saw a brilliant light glaring through the night above the crest of the hill they had just topped in their descent into the ravine, or, to be more explicit, the small valley, where stood the crumbling house of the Squibbs. The purr of a rapidly moving motor car rose above the rain, the light rose, fell, swerved to the right and left.
“Someone must be in a hurry.” commented Bridge.
There isn’t any better writing than that. Another writer can say it differently but he can’t say it better. Just imagine the movie Frankenstein or Wolf Man when you’re reading it. Burroughs did as well in less than the time it takes to show it.
A body is thrown from the speeding car a shot following after it. Bridge goes to pick up the body.
Thus the mystery and horror and terror of the dark and stormy night has been building. Bridge carrying the body which may or may not be alive asks the Kid to open the door.
Behind him came Bridge as the youth entered the dark interior. A half dozen steps he took when his foot struck against a soft yielding mass. Stumbling he tried to regain his equilibrium only to drop fully upon the thing beneath him. One open palm extended to ease his fall, it fell upon the uplifted features of a cold and clammy face.
Yipes! What more do you need? Cold and dripping, half crazed from fear, overwhelmed by the thought he might be a murderer the Kid’s hand falls on cold and clammy dead flesh. Bridge is standing there with maybe another dead person in his arms. The Kid is also aware that the murderous hoboes are hot on his trail.
If that doesn’t get you then somehow I think you can’t be got.
Not yet finished Burroughs builds up the tension. Striking a match from the specially lined water proof pocket of Bridge’s coat they find a dead man wearing golden earrings. Obviously a gypsy but while staring in unsimulated horror they hear from the base of the stairs of a dark dank cellar the clank of a slowly drawn chain as a heavy weight makes the stairs creak.
This is too much for the nerves of the Kid. Burroughs brilliantly contrasts the terror of the unknown in the basement with the fear of the dark at the top of the stairs. You know where that’s at, I’m sure, I sure do. In a flash the Kid chooses the unknown at the top of the stairs to the horror in the cellar.
What do you want?
The hoboes are still slipping and sliding down the descent into the ravine of the subconscious. Horror in front, terror behind. There is absolutely no place to hide. Nightmare City, don’t you think? How could anyone do it better? What do you mean he can’t write? Put the scenes in a movie and everyone in the theatre would be covering their eyes. Itd\ would be that Beast With Five Fingers all over again. Maybe worse. Never saw that one? Check it out. Peter Lorre. Terrifying. Of course I was a kid.
The clanking of the chain recreates an incident in Burroughs’ own life when he had a job collecting for an ice company. He called on a house and while he was waiting he heard the clanking of a chain coming slowly up the driveway. Waiting with a fair amount of trepidation he saw a huge dog dragging the chain appear. ERB backing slowly away forgot about the delinquent bill.
In this case the chain is attached to Beppo the dancing bear but Bridge and the Kid won’t know that until the next day.
They retreat into an upstairs bedroom. Here what Burroughs describes in capital letters as THE THING and IT pursues them. I remember two movies one called The Thing and the other It.
Just when the thing retreats the murderous gang of hoboes enters the house. Wow! Out of the frying pan and into the fire in this night of terrors as the lightning continues to flash and the thunder crash.
Discovering the dead man and as the bear begins moving again four of the hoboes flee while two who were on the staircase being trapped in the house flee into the same bedroom as Bridge, the Kid and the girl, Hettie. Shortly thereafter a woman’s scream pierces the lightning and the thunder then silences as the storm settles into a steady drizzle.
The rest of the night is one tense affair between the murderous hoboes and the Bridge and the girls. Not a moment to catch your breath.
In the morning when they go downstairs the mystery increases when they find the dead man gone and nothing in the cellar. If they’d had Tarzan along he would have not only been able to smell the bear but to tell whether if was black or brown.
After a brief confrontation Dopey Charlie and the General are driven off. Bridge’s relationship with the Kid is then deepened. Even though all the Kid’s reactions are repulsive to the manhood of Bridge he feels his attraction to the seeming boy growing stronger.
Not since he had followed the open road with Byrne, had Bridge met one with whom he might care to “pal” before.
This brings up an interesting hint of latent homosexuality. My fellow writer, David Adams has objected that in my analysis of Emasculation as applied to ERB is that he should have been a homosexual but wasn’t.
There are degrees of emasculation and there are various degrees of psychotic reaction to it. I don’t say and I don’t believe that ERB was a homosexual but there was a degree of ambiguity introduced into his personality by his emasculation. I have touched on this in my ‘Emasculation, Hermaphroditism and Excretion.’
Here we have another example of it as Bridge is experiencing some homoerotic emotion which is very confusing to him as he has never wanted a ‘pal’ before. In hobo lingo I believe a ‘pal’ has a homosexual connotation.
If Burroughs took his ‘inside’ information on hoboes from Jack London’s The Road then Bridge is the sort of hobo London describes as the ‘profesh’, the hobo highest in the hierarchy of hobodom. London always thought of himself as a quick learner, so one doesn’t have to award his statement too much credibility but Burroughs apparently took him at face value.
As London describes the ‘profesh’ he has been on the road so long he knows all the ropes. Unlike the unkempt bums he realizes the importance of a good front and always dresses neatly. But he is hardened and capable of committing any crime.
While Bridge is obviously intended to be a ‘profesh’ he is neither criminal nor does he dress to put up a good front.
Another category of hobo London lists is the ‘road kid.’ These are young people just starting on the life of the road. The ‘profesh’ would often take one of more of these road kids under his wing as his fag, as the British would say, or in Americanese, a ‘pal.’ In other words a homosexual relationship. Thus this displays ERB’s sexual ambiguity which David couldn’t locate in my psychological analysis of ERB’s emasculation. In this case the ambiguity will be resolved and explained when we learn that the Kid is the beautiful young woman, Abigail Prim, and both Bridge and Burroughs heave a sigh of relief.
Nevertheless ERB is discussing homosexuality in an open and natural way that couldn’t be missed by the knowing and which may be unique for its time. But then, remember that one of ERB’s hats in this story is that of the Alienist, so that in these pages we are deep into the psychological abstractions and Doyle’s mystery stories as influences.
Now comes the time for breakfast. Someone has to ‘rustle’ grub. We have already learned in ‘Out There Somewhere’ that Bridge doesn’t rustle food, he rustles rhyme. Nothing has changed. The Kid goes out to get breakfast and when she comes back with the goods, true to form Bridge bursts forth with several snatches from H.H. Knibbs which surprisingly the demure Miss Prim recognizes. What has she been reading?
How might this apply to Burroughs’ own life. Let’s look at it. Burroughs was enamored of How to books but in his heart he must have considered them a fraud. Willie Case will soon pick up his copy of How To Be A Detective which he finds completely inapplicable to his circumstances. He also has the good sense to throw the book away reverting to his native intelligence which may be a subtle comment on How To books by Burroughs.
ERB always considered himself of the executive class. After his humiliating experience trying to sell door to door he never attempted it again. Instead as a master salesman he preferred to write how to sales manuals for others to use as they went door to door selling his line of pencil sharpeners or whatever while he sat in the office waiting for orders. Hence in his own life he was the ‘rustler of poetry’ or manuals while others rustled grub in the door to door humiliation of the actual selling. Here the Kid will do the door to door gig. ERB always makes me smile.
In this case in what may be a joke the Kid just buys the goods from the homeowner reversing the roles.
There are those who insist Burroughs can’t write but I find his stuff wonderfully condensed getting more mileage out of each word than anyone else I’ve ever read. Just see how he describes breakfast.
Shortly after, the water coming to a boil, Bridge lowered three eggs into it, glanced at his watch (an affluent hobo) greased one of the new cleaned stove lids with a piece of bacon rind and laid out as many strips of bacon as the lid would accommodate. Instantly the room was filled with the delicious odor of frying bacon.
“M-m-m-m!” gloated the Oskaloosa Kid. “I wish I had bo- asked for more. My! But I never smelled anything so good in all my life. Are you going to boil only three eggs? I could eat a dozen”
“The can’ll only hold three at a time,” explained Bridge. “we’ll have some boiling while we are eating these.” He borrowed the knife from the girl, who was slicing and buttering bread with it, and turned the bacon swiftly and deftly with the point, then he glanced at his watch. “Three minutes are up.” He announced and, with a couple small flat sticks saved for the purpose from the kindling wood, withdrew the eggs one at a time from the can.
“But we have no cups!” exclaimed the Oskaloosa Kid, in sudden despair.
Bridge laughed. “Knock an end off your egg and the shell will answer in place of a cup. Got a knife?”
The Kid didn’t. Bridge eyed him quizzically. “You must have done most of your burgling near home,” he commented.
The description of the breakfast between the time Bridge looked at his watch and when the three minutes were up was delightfully done. I could smell the bacon myself while I especially like the detail of swiftly and deftly turning the bacon with the knife point. The knife seemed to have disappeared between the bacon and knocking the end off the egg.
Nice details aren’t they? You’d almost think Burroughs had actually done things like this for years. There’s enough blank spots in his life that he may have had more experiences of this sort than we know about. Take for instance the three days in Michigan between the writing of Out There Somewhere and Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid. He says it took him twelve hours by train on four different lines to return to Coldwater from Alma. It is not impossible that he was hoboing back for the experience. He knew that he was going to write Bridge And The Kid next; might he not have been picking up local color?
Likewise in Bridge And The Kid he mentions the road from Berdoo to Barstow with seeming familiarity. Had he met Knibbs and the two embarked on a few days road trip as the expert Knibbs showed him some of the ropes?
I don’t know but there is something happening in his life which has not been explained.
Perhaps also the hoboism which appears in 1915-17 in his work when by all rights his success should have permitted him entry into more exalted social circles symbolized a rejection by so-called polite society. If so, why? Certainly the serialization of Tarzan Of The Apes in the Chicago paper must have raised eyebrows when people said something like: Is that the same Edgar Rice Burroughs who’s been tramping around town for the last several years?
After all people live in a town where a reputation is attached to them whether earned or not. In reviewing the jobs Burroughs had after he left Sears, Roebuck there is a certain unsavory character to them. Indeed, one employer, a patent medicine purveyor was shut down by the authorities while ERB then formed a partnership with this disgraced person. Where was Burroughs when the authorities showed up to shut the business down? I make no moral judgments. I’m of the Pretty Boy Floyd school of morality: Some will rob you with a six gun, some use a fountain pen. Emasculation is the name of the game.
It is certainly true that many, perhaps most, of the patent medicines of the time were based on alcohol and drugs therefore either addictive or harmful to the health. Samuel Hopkins Adams was commissioned by Norman Hapgood of Collier’s magazine to write a series of articles exposing the patent medicine business in 1906.
http://www.mtn.org/quack/ephemera/oct7.htm . A consequence of the articles may very well have been the shutting down of Dr. Stace. I think it remarkable that Burroughs didn’t distance himself from Stace at that time.
Even as Adams was presenting his research on patent medicines Upton Sinclair was exposing the hazards of the Chicago meat packing industry whose products were no less hazardous to the public health than patent medicines. Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, as well as perhaps Adams’ articles resulted in the Pure Food And Drug Act of 1906.
The products of meatpackers were so bad the British wouldn’t even feed them to their Tommies. That’s pretty bad.
So, if the Staces of the world were criminal and ought to be put out of business then by logic so should have the Armours and Swifts but what in our day would be multi-billion dollar industries don’t get shut down for the minor offence of damaging the health of millions.
One can’t be sure of Burroughs’ reasoning but his writing indicates that he was keenly aware of the hypocrisy of legalities. Perhaps for that reason he stuck by Dr. Stace.
However Stace was put out of business and the Armours and Swifts weren’t. While I applaud ERB’s steadfastness I deplore his lack of judgment for surely his reputation was tarred with the same brush as Dr. Stace.
When society figures may have asked who this Edgar Rice Burroughs was they were given, perhaps, a rundown on Dr. Stace and patent medicines as well as other employments that seem a little murky to us at present. I’m sure the ERB was seen as socially unacceptable. Thus Bridge who has lived among the hoboes has never partaken of their crimes so there is no reason for society to reject him especially as he is the son of a millionaire.
In any event ERB left Chicago for the Coast returning in 1917 then leaving for good at the beginning of 1919. Life ain’t easy. Ask me.
As Bridge, the Kid and the putative Abigail Prim were finishing breakfast the great detective Burton pulls up in front of the Squibbs place. Burton is obviously a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Allan Pinkerton. We have been advised of the Holmes connection in the opening paragraphs of this book. ERB describes Burton thusly:
Quote:
Burton made no reply. He was not a man to jump to conclusions. His success was largely due to the fact that he assumed nothing; but merely ran down each clew quickly yet painstakingly until he had a foundation of fact upon which to operate. His theory was that the simplest way is always the best way. And so he never befogged the main issue with any elaborate system of deductive reasoning based on guesswork. Burton never guessed. He assumed that it was his business to know; nor was he on any case long before he did know. He was employed now to find Abigail Prim. Each of the several crimes committed the previous night might or might not prove a clew to her whereabouts; but each must be run down in the process of elimination before Burton could feel safe in abandoning it.
That’s a pretty good understanding of Doyle’s presentation of Holmes. ERB did learn Holmes’ dictum that it was necessary to read all the literature on the subject to understand the mentality of one’s subjects. Burton did demonstrate some acumen in his arrest of Dopey Charlie and the General. He deployed an agent fifty yards below and fifty yards above to converge on the two criminals while he approached from the front. Either Burroughs had been doing some reading of his own or he picked up some experience or information from elsewhere.
Another keen point was when Burton went back to where the hoboes had been hiding to dig up the evidence they had concealed that would lead to their conviction for the Baggs murder.
It’s little details like these that always make me wonder where Burroughs picked up this stuff. He does it all so naturally but one can’t write what one doesn’t know. He must have been a curious man, good memory.
So Burroughs has a a pretty good understanding of the methods of Sherlock Holmes. It must be remembered that ERB was reading these stories as they first appeared not as we do as part of literature. Holmes, O.Henry, Jack London, E.W. Hornung, these were all fresh new and extremely stimulating with a great many references and inferences which are undoubtedly lost on us. Even in Bridge And The Kid ERB’s reference to the Kid’s bringing home the bacon is a direct reference to a quip the mother of the ex-heavyweight champion of the world Jack Johnson made just after he won the championship from Jim Jeffries: He said he’d bring home the bacon and he’s done it. I don’t doubt if many caught it then but I’m sure the phrase has become such a commonplace today that only a very few catch the reference and share the laugh.
Doyle’s stories such as A Study In Scarlet dealing with the Mormons and The Valley Of Fear dealing with the Molly Maguires would have had much more thrilling immediacy for ERB than they do for us. Also Burroughs has caught the essence of Holmes which was not so much the stories as the method of Holmes.
I have read the canon four times and while I could not reconstruct any of the stories without difficulty, if at all, maxims like- When you eliminate the impossible whatever remains no matter how improbable must be the truth. – have lodged in my mind since I was fourteen guiding my intellect to much advantage. So also the dictum to read all the literature. Not easy or even possible, but the more one has read the or read again the more things just fall in place without any real effort. You have to be able to remember, remembrance being the basis of all mind, of course. Holmes has been like a god to me.
If you wish to learn a source of Burroughs’ stories then all you have to do is apply the above methods; it will all become clear.
Burton moves the story forward as his appearance causes Bridge who isn’t sure what the status of the Kid and the putative Gail Prim is, elects to avoid the great detective even though they are friends.
The trio slip out the back into the woods following a track leading to ‘Anywhere’. Burroughs in a masterful telling catches the feel of a Spring day on a recently wetted trail littered with the leaves of yesteryear. Ou sont les neiges d’antan?
They come upon a clearing where a gypsy woman is burying a body. By this time Bridge has solved the mysteries of the previous evening.
The girls make noises upon hearing the clank of a chain in a hovel causing the gypsy woman to look around. Rather than spotting the trio she spots Willie Case hiding in the bushes who she drags out.
The gypsy woman, Giova, is as good a character as Bridge, the Kid, Burton and the hoboes, but my favorite of the story is Willie Case, the fourteen year old detective. While to my mind ERB presents Willie as a thoroughly admirable character, he nevertheless vents a suppressed mean streak not only on Willie but on the whole Case family.
ERB doesn’t let his mean streak show very often, it lurks in the background, but he lets it loose in this book. He must have been under personal stress.
He describes Willie as having no forehead and no chin, imbecilic traits, literally beginning with the eyebrows and ending with the lips. A freak of nature, a real grotesque. That means that Willie was a real ‘low brow’ as Emma accused ERB of being, even a no brow. Is it a coincidence that Emma called ERB a low brow or that the literati thought ERB wrote ‘low brow’ literature?
In point of fact Willie strikes me as an intelligent boy. He analyzes the situation always being in the right place at the right moment. Burton himself pays him a high but sneering compliment then cheats him out of the promised reward of a hundred dollars but in the manner McClurg’s published his books Burroughs was cheated out of a large part of his reward.
I don’t say that’s the case but if so it fits the facts.
In any event ERB treats the Case family meanly; they might almost be prototypes of Ma and Pa Kettle of the Egg and I or the meanly portrayed characters of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. Jeb Case behaves very reprehensively at the lynching although once again he merely reported the facts that the Kid gave Willie. The Kid did tell Willie that he had burgled a house and killed a man. So, perhaps ERB created some characters that he could kick around as he felt himself being kicked.
And then we have the gypsy woman, Giova. She and her father are not only pariahs in general society as gypsies but because of her father they even have been cast out by the gypsies. Her father was a thief from both general and gypsy society. The former may have been laudable in gypsy terms but the latter wasn’t. They make, or made their living by thieving and cadging coins with Beppo, their dancing bear. Beppo of the evil eye.
Burroughs presents Giova as being sexually attractive with lips that were made for kissing, in echo of the refrain from Out There Somewhere. Here we may have a first inference that Emma was in trouble; the kind of trouble that would have ERB leaving her for another woman a decade or so hence. There are numerous rumblings indicating the trend not least of which was ERB’s fascination with Samuel Hopkin Adams’ novel, Flaming Youth of a few years hence and the subsequent movie starring Colleen Moore.
Bridge is now on the run with three women and a bear and he hasn’t done anything wrong to get into such hot water. One woman his emergent Anima, one, his rejected Anima, and the last a longing for a woman whose lips were made for kissing. Wow! This is all taking place in a ravine that opens into a small valley too.
All this has been accomplished in a compact one hundred pages. One third of the book is left for the denouement that Burroughs scamps as he usually does.
Giova decks them all out as gypsies which must have been an amusing sight to the Paysonites as this troop of madcaps complete with dancing bear in tow troop inconspicuously through town. Surprised they didn’t call out the national guard just for that.
As the story draws to a close ERB contributes a wonderful vignette of low brow Willie dining out at a ‘high brow’ restaurant called the Elite in Payson. The idea of Willie being conspicuous in a burg like Payson which we big city people would refer to as a hick town good only for laughs is amusing in itself. You know, it all depends on one’s perspective:
Willie Case had been taken to Payson to testify before the coroner’s jury investigating the death of Giova’s father, and with the dollar which the Osklaloosa Kid had given him in the morning burning in his pocket had proceeded to indulge in an orgy of dissipation the moment that he had been freed from the inquest. Ice cream, red pop, peanuts, candy, and soda water may have diminished his appetite but not his pride, and self-satisfaction as he sat down and by night for the first time in a public eatery place Willie was now a man of the world, a bon vivant, as he ordered ham and eggs from the pretty waitress of The Elite Restaurant on Broadway; but at heart he was not happy for never before had he realized what a great proportion of his anatomy was made up of hands and feet. As he glanced fearfully at the former, silhouetted against the white of the table cloth, he flushed scarlet, assured as he was that the waitress who had just turned away toward the kitchen with his order was convulsed with laughter and that every other eye in the establishment was glued upon him. To assume an air of nonchalance and thereby impress and disarm his critics Willie reached for a toothpick in the little glass holder near the center of the table and upset the sugar bowl. Immediately Willie snatched back the offending hand and glared ferociously at the ceiling. He could feel the roots of his hair being consumed in the heat of his skin. A quick side glance that required all his will power to consummate showed him that no one appeared to have noticed his faux pas and Willie was again slowly returning to normal when the proprietor of the restaurant came up from behind and asked him to remove his hat.
Never had Willie Case spent so frightful a half hour as that within the brilliant interior of the Elite Restaurant. Twenty-three minutes of this eternity was consumed in waiting for his order to be served and seven minutes in disposing of the meal and paying his check. Willie’s method of eating was in itself a sermon on efficiency- there was no waste motion- no waste of time. He placed his mouth within two inches of his plate after cutting his ham and eggs into pieces of a size that would permit each mouthful to enter without wedging; then he mixed his mashed potatoes in with the result and working his knife and fork alternatively with bewildering rapidity shot a continuous stream of food into his gaping maw.
In addition to the meat and potatoes there was one vegetable side dish on the empty plate, seized a spoon in lieu or a knife and fork and – presto! The side dish was empty. Where upon the prune dish was set in the empty side-dish- four deft motions and there were no prunes in the dish. The entire feat had been accomplished in 6:34 ½ , setting a new world’s record for red headed farm boys with one splay foot.
In the remaining twenty-five and one half seconds Willie walked what seemed to him a mile from his seat to the cashier’s desk and at the last instant bumped into a waitress with a trayful of dishes. Clutched tightly in Willie’s hand was thirty-five cents and his check with a like amount written upon it. Amid the crash of crockery which followed the collision Willie slammed check and money upon the cashier’s desk and fled. Nor did he pause until in the reassuring seclusion of a dark side street. There Willie sank upon the curb alternately cold with fear and hot with shame, weak and panting, and into his heart entered the iron of class hatred, searing it to the core.
The above passage has many charms. First, it is an excellent piece of nostalgia now, although at the time it represented the actuality, thus, as a period piece it is an accurate picture of the times. And then it is excellent comedy as well as a a parody as I will attempt to show.
One has to wonder if ERB really thought the Elite was a pretty fine restaurant. If so, one wonders where he took Emma and kids for a night out. Not too many gourmet Chicago restaurants served breakfast for dinner. Ham and eggs with mashed potatoes? Reminds me of the Galt House Hotel in Louisville where a ‘starch’ is served as a side dish. What exactly was this side-dish Willie wolfed- stewed tomatoes? The dessert prunes- dessert prunes?- was a nice touch too. Dessert for breakfast? Another nice quality touch at the Elite was the cup of toothpicks. Of course, those were the days cuspidors were de riguer so what do I know, maybe the Palmer House had a cup of toothpicks on the table too. I know they had cuspidors.
It does seem clear that little Willie was far down the social scale of little rural Payson. They had electric street lights, though. I’m not even from New York City but I would find the Elite, how shall I say, quaint and charming? Of course, New York City is not what it used to be either. Can’t fool me in either case; I’ve dined out in Hannibal. Good prices. Bountiful. Plenty of side dishes something that I’d never seen before.
I’m sure I’ve been in Willie’s shoes, or would have been if he’d chosen to wear them, too, so I have a great deal of sympathy for the lad. A man with a dollar has the right to spend where and as he chooses. Damn social hypocrisy!
In addition to the charm and light comedy ERB interjects a little parody of Taylorism and mass production into the mix.
For those not familiar with Frederick W. Taylor and his methods I quote from
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/dead453-653/ideabook1/thompson-jones/Taylorism.htm :
Taylor wrote “The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. These principles became known as Taylorism. Some of the principles of Taylorism include (Management for Productivity, John R. Schermerhorn, Jr. (1991)):
Develop a ‘science’ for every job, including rules of motion, standardized work implements, and proper working conditions.
Carefully select workers with the right abilities for the job.
Carefully train these workers to do the job, and give them proper incentives to cooperate with the job science.
Support these workers by planning their work and by smoothing the way as they go about their jobs.
Taylorism which led to maximum efficiency also give the lie to the unconscious of Sigmund Freud, or at least puts it into perspective. If the twentieth century has been the history of the devil of Freud’s unconscious it has also been the century of the triumph of the god of conscious intelligence. The question only remains which will triumph.
One of the recurring themes in ERB’s writing of the period is efficiency. Indeed, a couple years hence he will write a book entitled The Efficiency Expert.
It was the age of efficient mass production which required standardized motions and produced terrific results where applied as at Henry Ford’s marvelously efficient factories. Ford brought the task to the worker in well lighted clean factory spaces at a level which required no time consuming, fatiguing and unnecessary lifting or bending. Plus Henry Ford blew the industrial world away by doubling the going wage for unskilled labor. He changed the course of economic history singlehanded. He achieved more than the Communists or IWW could have accomplished in a million years earning their undying enmity. He may in one fell swoop have defeated the Reds. They sure thought so.
But, go back and review how Willie organizes his repast for consumption. Taylor-like he eliminated all non-essential motions then with maximum assembly line speed-up he gets production into one continuous stream.
A comic effect to be sure but there is even more comedy in the parody of the assembly line and Taylorism. I’m sure ERB intended it just that way.
Willie may be a joke but there is a certain flavor to be obtained by filling a continuum of food, mouth and time. Such an opportunity for enjoyment may present itself once in ten years or so. Willie saw his opportunity and seized it which he does throughout the story. Willie is OK with me.
I have eaten that way but I now reserve the method for ice cream and highly recommend it. My last opportunity, they present themselves but rarely and can’t be forced, was several years ago when I was insultingly offered a half melted Cherries Jubilee. The dish was of a perfect consistency for assembly line consumption. I saw my chance and like Willie, I took it. I kind of distributed cherries and ice cream chunks in the creamy stew, got mouth in the right position and cleaned the bowl in sixty seconds flat, reared back gripping the bridge of my nose, honked a couple times as the freeze seized my brain and then took a few minutes for consciousness to return. One of the great natural highs in this drug infested time. I tell ya‘, fellas, they was all lookin’ at me but I am much beyond the iron of class hatred. If they can’t take a joke…well, you know the finish. So I think Willie Case did the right thing.
Clumsy waitress to get in his way anyway. Fourteen hours on the job was no excuse.
Willie didn’t feel guilt for too long though, for what ERB calls a faux pas, it put him in the right place at the right time to see Giova and her dancing bear fresh from Beppo’s own slops. How could ERB be so cruel to a dumb animal- the bear, not Willie-, one that was going to save the heroine’s life- both the bear and Willie.
After having had dinner and refreshments Willie still had 20 cents left from a dollar of which he spent 10 cents for a detective movie and had ten cents left over for a long distance phone call to Burton in Oakdale after he spotted Giova and her dancing bear when he came out of the movie theatre.
He followed Giova to Bridge and the girls, fixed their location then called Burton. Not only did Willie spot the fugitives but so did the four leftover bums. Dopey Charlie and the General were impounded for the Baggs murder while we will learn that the real Oskaloosa Kid and the putative Gail Prim remain as well perhaps as the true identity of L. Bridge.
Burroughs is full of interesting details. The hoboes are gathered in an abandoned electrical generating plant which had formerly served Payson but had been discontinued for a larger plant servicing Payson from a hundred miles away. We don’t know when that might have happened but electrical generation and distribution was relatively new. The consolidation into larger generating units was even newer. Samuel Insull, whose electrical empire collapsed about1938 had begun organizing distribution in 1912 when he formed the Mid-West Utilities in Chicago absorbing all the smaller companies such as this one in Payson obviously.
I find details like this the exiting part of reading Burroughs.
The murderous hoboes set out to rob and kill Bridge and the Kid while Sky Pilot and Dirty Eddie elect themselves to return the putative Gail Prim who we will learn is actually Hettie Penning, thus doubling ERB’s Anima figure and connecting the latter to the former.
One is put in mind of the Hettie of H.G. Wells’ novel In The Days Of The Comet. Both Hetties exhibit the same traits. While it may seem a slender connection, still, ERB has so many references to other authors and their works that the connection is not improbable. For obvious reasons ERB always insisted he had never read H.G. Wells. Wells? Wells, who?, but how could he not have?
Bridge and the girls would have met their end except that Willie Case’s call brought Burton on the run who arrives in time to save their lives. Unfortunately Beppo of the evil eye meets his end after having done Burton’s job for him much as Willie always did.
In between the girls, the ‘boes, Bridge and the coppers Burton has a full load so he drops Bridge and Kid at the Payson jail. Willie Case had not only solved the case for the ingrate Burton but saved the life of Gail Prim posing as the Oskaloosa Kid. In a heart wrenching scene little Willie seeking his just reward is cruelly rejected and cheated by the Great Detective. I don’t know, maybe I read too closely and get too involved. Or, just maybe, ERB is a great writer.
It’s all over but the shouting and along comes the mob howling from Oakdale for the blood of Bridge and the Kid. I tell ya, boys, it wuz close. Burton arrived in time but not before Bridge with a well aimed blow broke Jeb Case’s jaw. What did those Cases ever do to ERB I wonder?
In the end Hettie Penning is identified, clearing up that mystery. Burton is able to tell Bridge’s dad who has spent $20,000 looking for him that he is found. It may even have cost less for Stanley to find Livingston. Of course there was a lousy rail system in the Congo in Livingston’s time. Bridge is united with Gail obviously prepared to renounce the roving life. Thus the promise of Out There Somewhere is redeemed. Bridge has found his woman.
Thus on paper, at least, Burroughs is reunited with his Animus in gorgeous female attire. No more men in women’s clothes or women in men’s clothes.
2.
Bridge And The Kid is a very short book, only 152 pages in my Charter paperback edition of 1979 (Septimius Favonius BB #24. Charter didn’t see fit to include a date.) Although first issued in book form so late as 1937, it was reprinted in 1938 and 1940 so there must have been some early readers however when reprinted in 1974 there could have been few who remembered it.
My fellow writer, David Adams wrote a short review in the same issue #24 of the Burroughs Bulletin, October 1995, in which he also recognized the importance of this book to the corpus:
It may come as a surprise that anyone could possibly think of calling the novelette, THE OAKDALE AFFAIR, a major work of such a prolific writer as Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I found it to be such an animal…
I am unaware that any other than Mr. Adams and myself have reviewed the book. To sum up:
There seems to be an obvious connection to Jack London in the Bridge Trilogy (I prefer Bridge to Mucker because the latter draws reproving stares and no one today knows what a mucker is. It sounds slightly obscene.)
Mr. Adams, who is more of an authority on Jack London than myself, I’ve only begun to read London as a result of Bill Hillman’s series of articles in ERBzine, which posits a strong connection between Burroughs and London, and not the other way around, feels the novels have a great deal to do with London. The connection seems to be there but I have only begun to read London’s relevant or major works.
What ERB’s attitude towards London may have been which seems ambiguous isn’t clear. Burroughs never wrote about London and never mentions him explicitly. There are many points of disagreement between the two politically and socially. Burroughs does seem to have liked London and his work although what he read or when he read it isn’t clear. There are no London titles in his library.
The second major influence in the novel is the problem of hoboism connected with the IWW and labor unrest.
In the background Burroughs is working out his Anima/Animus problem.
The whole is framed in the form of a rather magnificent detective story patterned after Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories with a dash, perhaps a soupcon, of E.W. Hornung thrown in.
Attention should be paid to the psychological aspects.
Many of ERB’s favorite themes such as the efficiency expert are also thrown in. Nifty historical details like Samuel Insull’s electrical empire are added to the mix as well as Taylorism.
If anything ERB was too efficient, too economical in his use of words. The Book could easily have been fleshed out another sixty or hundred pages with no loss in the marvelous immediacy of the telling. If anything the story is too condensed. I found myself pausing over each description to recreate a mental image of the depiction. I was willing to do so and the personal reward was great. How much ERB was the creator of my vision of the story and how much my own as collaborator isn’t clear to me. Perhaps ERB just outlined the story ‘suggesting’ the scenario, expecting the reader to ‘customize’ the story as he reads along. This may be the first ‘inter-active’ novel. If so, Burroughs may be an even more innovative and greater writer than he is commonly thought to be.
Pt. I: Only The Strong Survive
March 30, 2012
Only The Strong Survive
Part I
An Examination Of Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid
(The Oakdale Affair)
As Created By Edgar Rice Burroughs
by
R.E. Prindle
Part I
Background And Sources
Texts:
E.R. Burroughs: Out There Somewhere (The Return Of The Mucker), 1916
Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid (The Oakdale Affair) 1917
David A. Adams: ERB/London Connection, ERBzine #1298, 2005
Philip R. Burger: Whatever It Is, Gets You And Me, ERBzine 1412, 2005
R.E. Prindle: Only A Hobo, ERBzine #1329-34, 2004
(a).
Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid, published as The Oakdale Affair was written shortly after Burroughs posed for the famous picture of himself standing on the rock above the sea in Santa Monica in 1916.
Let’s take a moment to put these titles into perspective with Burroughs’ career. Let’s try to identify some of the changes he’s going through. It is safe to assume that in 1911 at 36 years of age when he sat down to write A Princess Of Mars he was in a state of terror that life had passed him by, that he had failed the big test from which there is no recovering. If he says that he considered writing to be an unmanly occupation then he was desperately grasping at the last straw. If he failed as a writer then he would have had an excuse as it was a sissy occupation but he still would have been psychologically destroyed.
But Princess sold and then too did Tarzan Of The Apes. Buoyed by these successes he continued to write achieving during the year 1913 a pinnacle of success achieved by few writers. Most importantly Burroughs could for the first time in his adult live perceive himself as a somebody, as the man he always thought he was or should be.
The miracle of 1913 continued and with the confidence of a seemingly inexhaustible pen promised to continue. Burroughs indulged his whims during those fantastic years between 1913 and 1916. He apparently bought everything that he had ever wanted. When he left on that fabled drive from Chicago to L.A. in addition to a car, a truck and a driver he had 2 1/2 tons of, pardon the expression, junk.
He was living in a dream. I envision the surreal picture of this caravan pulling to the side of the road away out there on the road to anywhere with Burroughs pitching his white and blue striped circus tent while the kids aged about eight, seven and three cranked up the record player. They didn’t need electricity in those days, you would wind the record player up. Then as the horn blared out ‘Are You From Dixie’ singing lustily the family danced in the moonlight. Place the picture against a rising full moon.
Imagine a country rube happening along on Old Dobbin to see such a scene. It’s just like Toad and his caravan from Wind In The Willows, isn’t it? What Memories the children must have had.
And all the time Burroughs’ personality was unraveling as he metamorphosed into a new persona.
Let’s take a look at that picture by the seashore closely. It is revealing. There is no reason not to believe that this picture was carefully thought out and posed by ERB. The photo is frequently cropped so as to put Burroughs in the center but in its uncropped state the sea stretches far to the left making the subjects of the photo both ERB and the feminine sea. Burroughs is standing on the right on a rock high above the water. Let us believe that was his intent. In his novel Somewhere Out There written from January to March 1916 the theme is the poem by H.H. Knibbs also titled Out There Somewhere in which the dream lover is waiting in the South by the sea. Obviously ERB has an idea fixed in his mind.
As he finished the novel he began his tramp South to San Diego and the sea. Thus the sea, the waters of the subconscious, the fructifying water of the female represents both the destructive and constructive aspects of the female. Standing on the rock, as opposed to the shifting sands, high above the waters represents Burroughs’ hopeful reunion with and dominance of the Anima.
Burroughs’ persona itself, his Animus is equally interesting. He is very expensively dressed. That overcoat is a very new one, either a Kuppenheimer or a Hart, Shaffner and Marx, as Burroughs combines the two names in a reference in Bridge And The Kid. It is also unnecessary in California at any time of the year. His shoes are shined, top quality also, probably Florsheim. His hat is pulled low over his face as he stands above the photographer looking down on him or her with a wry, bemused hint of a smile with which he endows his creations. His hands are in his pockets with the thumbs, the sexual symbol exposed. Thumbs are a sexual symbol of potency, as in ‘under my thumb’ so he is feeling confident in his success if not cocky. He is the Mysterious Stranger. The Shadow. The lurker in every mind. He is at the very height of his success and yet facing the problems his success has brought. This photo represents the high summer of his life. It is never going to be this good again.
Out There Somewhere pointed to a resolution of his psychological problems while Bridge And The Kid apparently resolved them, at least, for the moment.
There is an interesting numerical relationship in Burroughs’ visits to the coast. His first was in 1913, the second visit was in 1916 and he would move permanently to California in 1919- three year intervals, and each time he stayed about nine months- time to be born again. These are stress points. One wonders at what time in his life he began his California dreaming.
Thus Burroughs began Bridge And The Kid in a state of exhilaration. It took him nearly six months to finish it which for him was a long time.
His period of extreme fecundity was also over. In the future he would be driven to work because he needed the money but his psychological release was finished with these two novels.
(b).
Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid is one of Burroughs most finely crafted novels. It is extremely rich in content. Because of the apparent ease with which Burroughs writes one disregards the components of the tale and there are many in what I consider the most detailed and intriguing novel.
ERB began the hobo theme in vol. 1 of this trilogy, The Mucker, developed it in the sequel Out There Somewhere (The
Jack London
Return Of The Mucker) and continues it not only in the character of Bridge and the Kid but in the criminal gang and throughout the novel. The hobo obviously intrigued ERB and why not? Rather than just discuss the hobo theme as elements of the story let’s look more closely at the subject.
Just as today the so-called homeless occupy an amazing amount of social attention so in Burroughs’ time the hobo was an inescapable phenomenon. He was ubiquitous, he was everywhere as a reading of Out there Somewhere and Bridge and The Kid indicate. Burroughs found the hobo fascinating and even to a degree identified with him.
Every town of any size had a Main Stem on which the Hoboes congregated. Chicago itself with most rail lines converging on it from all directions was the Main Stem of hoboing while Madison was the Main Stem of Chicago. As it chances the offices of the American Battery Company were on Madison Street thus the young Burroughs would have had plenty of opportunity to observe and study the hobo.
As a yard policeman in Salt Lake City in 1904 he would have had further opportunity to familiarize himself with the species. His first writing effort- Minidoka- in 1908 or so gives the Hobo a prominent place actually siting Chicago as the Hobo capital of the country.
In both these novels he give a very unflattering picture of the Hobo. In both novels the Hoboes figure as criminals, even murderous criminals. In Bridge And The Kid they are responsible for the crime wave in normally placid Oakdale.
When the Kid stumbles upon a lair of six hoboes all are willing to rob her while an actual cold blooded attempt on her life was made by Dopey Charlie.
Burroughs associates one, the General, with Coxey’s Army of 1894. Eighteen-ninety-three was the beginning of a severe depression perhaps equal to the depression of the thirties. In 1994 Jacob Coxey organized a march on Washington of the unemployed seeking relief. The host was known as Coxey’s Army.
Burroughs who was frequently unemployed and hard up yet always found jobs to scrape by, exhibited all the pride of the resourceful by condemning the ‘soldiers’ of Coxey’s Army as bums who wouldn’t work, hence the General had never held a job and never would. He preferred to rob and kill rather than work.
One of the more memorable episodes of the book is when morning dawns on Jeb Case’s farm and the hoboes come streaming out of the barn and haystacks as Case takes up a shotgun to make sure they move on.
Burroughs who had no use for the IWW- the Industrial Workers Of The World- or Wobblies, introduces them also in the character of Sky Pilot. As the Wobblies were composed almost entirely of the hobo class they might easily have been classed as hoboes pure and simple. The Sky Pilot is I believe based on Big Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, the WFM, and then when he was expelled from that organization for being too aggressive, of the IWW where you couldn’t be too aggressive.
Big Bill is one of the great figures of the era, he has a great autobiography, and he figures indirectly in the history of the Burroughs Boys so ERB would have concentrated on his career. The battles of the hard rock miners in Colorado, Idaho and the West in general with the mine owners were ferocious. The resistance to their just demands by the mine owners forms one of the most disgraceful chapters in American history.
Big Bill was at the center of the dispute. In Idaho the governor who resisted the WFM was Frank Steunenberg. He had appointed Harry and George Burroughs as delegates to a mining conference so the Burroughs had an association with him.
When Steunenberg left the governor’s chair in 1905 he was blown to bits by a bomb placed in his mailbox. Big Bill didn’t place the bomb but it does seem likely that he planned the bombing. ERB thought so. In one of the most famous trials of the era Haywood was defended by Clarence Darrow who got him off with lamest defense ever.
Governor Frank Steunenberg
Thus Burroughs describes the Sky Pilot as the man who planned the crimes but was always somewhere else when they were committed. He made people ‘disappear’ in the manner in which Steunenberg disappeared.
From the WFM Big Bill went on to be the leader of the Wobblies. There can be no doubt that Burroughs was opposed to the Wobblies. In book after book in this period he denounces the outfit. After the Great War broke out in 1914 the IWW became especially active leading to the speculation that their activities were funded by the Kaiser’s gold. This was never proven at the time but it seems very probable as the Germans wanted to disrupt American productivity while Big Bill and the Wobblies wanted to take over industry and the government on behalf of the ‘working’ man, who had nothing to do with them. The crime wave of Oakdale caused by the hoboes may have been a fictionalization of a wave of IWW activity which resulted in a large number of violent strikes in 1916 shortly before this book was written. Thus Burroughs wove Big Bill Haywood, Coxey’s Army, The Western Federation of Miners and the ‘16 Wobbly actions into the story in ‘a highly fictionized’ manner.
If fact Burroughs may have been recapitulating several decades of labor history as he introduces the great Chicago
Big Bill Haywood
detective Burton. Obviously based on one level on Allan Pinkerton of the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency which was employed to control labor unrest. In fact the Pinkertons had kidnapped Big Bill as operatives against the WFM turning him over to Idaho after Steunenberg was murdered. One of their operatives, Charlie Siringo, was instrumental in breaking up the miners in the Coeur D’Alene area. Wonderful story he tells in his A Cowboy Detective.
Not only does Burton represent the Pinkertons but after withholding his first name throughout the story, as an inside joke, Bridge who knows Burton hails him as Dick. Of course slang for detective was a ‘dick’ as in Dick Tracy but also Dick is short for Richard. So Burton was Richard Burton. Richard Francis Burton was the famous African explorer so Burroughs weaves in another historical reference.
By the time the book was finished on 6/12/17 the United States was involved in the war with Germany so at that point the activities of the IWW were treasonous.
(c).
The Incomparable Charlie Siringo
Burroughs’s novels are always more complex than they seem on the surface. Like any novelist he has to have a story to tell but that story arises from conscious and subconscious motives. Some of the conscious motives are in the relation of his disguised feelings about unskilled labor, the hoboes and the IWW. The subconscious motives emerge in his depiction of his heroine, Abigail Prim and the hero, the Happy Hobo, Bridge. As this is an Anima/Animus story it should be clear that Abigail Prim represent ERB’s Anima and Bridge represents his Animus. The two characters are not original to this story but a variation on all his heroines and heroes whose adventures are a variation of the adventures of all his heroes and heroines.
The Great Detective 1862 Allan Pinkerton
Burroughs entered the hobo theme in the first novel of this trilogy, The Mucker, then developed the theme in the middle volume, Out There Somewhere, which introduces his stellar character Bridge, the Happy Hobo.
As it chances one of Burroughs’ literary heroes was Jack London. London (1876-1918) was an exact contemporary, Burroughs being born in September, London in the following January. He was actually born eleven days after Emma.
It has been suggested that the death of London in 1916 influenced Burroughs’ writing of Out There Somewhere. As the book was written between January and March and London died in November of that year the connection seems unlikely.
It does seem likely that Burroughs read everything he came across of London’s. He seems to have thought he knew enough about London’s life to write a biography of him. If he was that familiar with London that is an interesting detail. It is impossible to know for certain what he read of London’s as there are no London titles in the Library as published on the ERBzine. While ERB seems to have made little attempt to fill in his library with titles that he read before he came into money it would seem likely that between 1913 and 1916 he would have picked up some London titles.
London was a very prolific writer penning dozens of novels, some few volumes of non-fiction and hundreds of short stories that appeared in dozens of magazines. It would seem highly probable that Burroughs would have read as much as he could find.
While London made a circuit of the United States and Canada in 1894 as a knight of the road not a great deal of his hobo writing had made it to print by 1916. The most significant of his hobo writing was a volume titled The Road of 1908. It would seem probable that Burroughs read at least this if he associated London with the road.
Perhaps more importantly London was uppermost in his mind in 1916 since W.R. Hearst had hired London to cover the Mexican Revolution in 1914. Bridge is introduced in Out There Somewhere on his way to Mexico. So that if Bridge is to be associated with London his despatches from Mexico were probably the immediate reason.
Even though Burroughs admired London as a writer they were at opposite poles politically. London claimed to be a confirmed socialist although he doesn’t write like one. As a revolutionist which he claimed to be he was in opposition to ERB.
Their views of the hobo were also in opposition so one wonders exactly what Burroughs was thinking. Burroughs makes Bridge the only honest hobo on the road while all others are depicted as violent criminals. In the first hobo scene in Out There Somewhere Bridge and Byrne are accosted by murderous hoboes who are defeated by the pugilist Byrne. The whole cast of hoboes in Bridge And The Kid are hardened criminals of the first water.
London on the other hand apologizes for his hoboes. When not victims of society they are philosophers who can astonish college professors with their learning. Thus London tends to whitewash the criminal aspects of the hobo. So, the question might arise as to whether Burroughs was correcting the image presented by his hero attempting to give him his take on the tribe. Remember London was still alive when Out There Somewhere was written and published in magazine form. It could have been meant for his eyes.
London was only eighteen when he made his tour of the country. He had already shipped out on a tour of the orient when seventeen. His moniker was Sailor Jack. He enlisted as a recruit in a clone of Coxey’s Army known as Kelly’s Army which left for DC from California.
As Burroughs mentions Coxey’s Army in Bridge And The Kid while he associates the Army with the IWW, then Wobbly activities may have called to mind London’s hobo experience. Obviously all these elements are interconnected.
If George Mc Whorter of the BB and Philip Berger are right and the L. in Bridge’s name refers to London Bridge that would be in keeping with the punning on the name Dick Burton.
London could be an element in the character of Bridge but not necessarily the dominant one while Byrne would also represent Jack London. It seems clear that Burroughs had been fascinated by the character of the hobo from an early age. As noted, the hobo appears as a significant character in his very first attempt at writing, Minidoka.
Burroughs may have affectionately joined his persona with that of London as Bridge is a declassed aristocrat which is almost a necessity for a Burroughs hero. In this case Bridge is a ‘Virginian’, a natural gentleman as well as a cultivated one. The Virginian in American history is the antithesis of the Puritan.
The Virginian was thought to be an innate gentleman, one of the ‘quality’ as opposed to the ‘equality’. The prototype of the manly man. Nearly all of Burroughs’ heroes are Virginians. Jack London didn’t have that distinction so in my opinion he represented Burroughs in his declassed state.
As a Virginian gentleman Bridge, apparently an unconventional sort, ‘volunteered’ to be a hobo because he rejected the settled life but he can reenter the aristocracy at will as he does at the end of the book. Hence while all other ‘boes are criminals or at least suspect Bridge is honest and above board. He’s known far and wide to the authorities as the only honest hobo. He’s the hobo who has Burton’s confidence.
In Out There Somewhere he is in search of the woman of his dreams. In Bridge And The Kid he finds her.
‘She’ is obviously Abigail Prim. Gail is a Cinderella figure. Her mother died. Jonas Prim, her father, remarried. Her stepmother, Pudgy Prim, while not conventionally wicked nevertheless does not wish the best for her step-daughter.
As the story opens, this is kind of hard to follow, Pudgy has sent her daughter to live with the man she has chosen as Gail’s future husband to see if she couldn’t learn to like him a little better. I’m sure I must have missed a connection somewhere but that is how I read it.
The man Pudgy has chosen for her is more than twice Gail’s nineteen years with the attendant infirmities. They used to age rapidly in those bygone days. ERB doesn’t tell us how old Gail was when her mother died but it seems strange that her father wouldn’t do more than grumble about this odd plan of his second wife.
While Gail appears to accept her step-mother’s decision to the extent of getting on a train bound for her suitor’s town she gets off early returning to Oakdale where she disguises herself as a boy then burgles her own property to take up a life on the road as a hobo. Of course ERB conceals from us that the girl Gail and boy burglar are one and the same.
Having looted herself of a fairly good sized fortune, a necklace alone was appraised by the General, a hobo, at fifty thousand dollars while she was carrying at least two thick wads of bills worth thousands as mixed in with the greenbacks, few of which were ones, were many yellow backs. There’s some currency information for you. Researching currency on the web it appears that yellow backs were hundred dollar bills while other denominations were all greenbacks. Completing the burglary she heads on down the road as night falls. After a couple misadventures with a dog and a bull Gail falls in with six criminal ‘boes in an abandoned shed.
A true innocent she flashes her fortune in front of the startled eyes of the ‘boes, hardened criminals every one. Mocking her naiveté one of the ’boes claims to know her as the Oskaloosa Kid who is out robbing and murdering at that very moment. Gail doesn’t know this, misses the joke and assumes the character of the Oskaloosa Kid.
After a failed robbery attempt by the ’boes Gail runs down the road in a gathering storm with the hoboes in pursuit. As she comes to a fork in the road she encounters the Happy Hobo, Bridge, who is apparently oblivious of the coming storm. He is merrily tramping along reciting some of his favorite poetry- out loud. The meter comes through better that way although the practice might raise comment from casual observers.
Bridge and the Kid join destinies.
So what is Burroughs talking about here in the psychological sense? He is following the same scheme he follows in all his Anima stories. Usually a sudden storm takes place on a yacht at sea and the survivors find themselves on a desert island. The plot develops that ERB used in the Outlaw Of Torn also. In that plot the little Prince’s nurse was murdered by a fencing instructor who then dressed as a woman to serve as the little Prince’s Anima. The Prince in Outlaw Of Torn was torn from his secure position in the world as Burroughs was in his.
In this story Gail has a wicked step-mother who wants to marry her off to an undesirable man. Gail voluntarily dresses and poses as a boy so that fencing master and boy serve the same function with the sexes reversed so that Gail is prepared to reveal herself and assume the role of Burroughs’ Anima returned to female form.
In Outlaw the Prince who becomes an outlaw, or outcast, Norman, is torn from his high station where he is declassed as an outlaw. In this story Bridge voluntarily declasses himself because he ’prefers’ life on the road among the criminals.
This book was written four years after Outlaw so Burroughs psychology has evolved. The emotional problem centers on Burroughs’ confrontation when he was eight or nine years old with a bully on the way to Brown school. ERB was so terrorized by the incident that his Animus was emasculated and his Anima was nearly annihilated. (The fencing master kills the nurse Maud and assumes the identity of the Anima.) As I have pointed out this means that Burroughs in his terror was hypnotized into accepting certain beliefs about himself. These are prime psychological facts which control one’s behavior. While under the influence of the hypnotist (John the Bully in this case) certain suggestions (Burroughs subconscious interpretation of the terror, his psychotic response) were fixated in his subconscious. These suggestions then influence or control the actions of the subject so long as they are active. They may be exorcised in the course of time, resolved in some manner, or they may control one’s actions for life as improbable as that seems to some people.
The purpose of analysis should be to locate these suggestions and resolve them. Freud called this ’the talking cure.’ Burroughs is doing the same thing in his writing, discussing the fixation (embedded suggestion) from many angles in an attempt to resolve it thus freeing himself from its control. All of his writings from 1911 to this novel contributed to its solution. In the Bridge Trilogy ERB succeeded in understanding his fixation but apparently lacked the follow through to eliminate it as a spirit of malaise followed him throughout his life.
In meeting his reconstituted Anima in boy’s disguise at the fork in the road or street corner, the crossroads in Outlaw, the original scene of hypnosis, he has recreated the original hypnotic incident. The hoboes pursuing Gail represent the bully. Symbolically they will all be joined in the haunted house during the storm. In this case the house takes the place of the desert island.
Thus Bridge leaves the broad, well-traveled road of happiness, (the yacht sinks) to join his destiny with the Kid on the less traveled hazardous road.
They enter the abandoned farm house which represents Burroughs’ self after the confrontation with John the Bully. Thus ERB’s Animus and Anima are once again together in his self or house although his Anima is disguised as a male and he doesn’t recognize her.
In this unresolved state the real Oskaloosa Kid drives by. He throws a woman from an open tonneau in a driving rain storm no less, firing a shot after her. The shot misses, the girl is stunned but otherwise uninjured. Thus ERB’s previous Anima is returned to him but unlike Maud she is unconscious but alive. The three are joined by the dual aspects of the bully spending the night together with them in a room of the farmhouse. So that is the set and setting.
2.
ERB is accused of being unduly influenced by his readings. This may be true. As a dependent personality as a result of his encounter he is highly influenced by those he admires. He has a high level of suggestibility as a result of his hypnosis. He seems to have been very willing to accept suggestions from his publishers such as Metcalf at All Story who suggested a medieval story which ERB undertook against his better judgment as Outlaw Of Torn.
However imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. ERB was a very flattering sort of guy. In this book he mentions several influences whose manner he imitates to some degree. But he always has a very original story.
The first issue is that of why a hobo hero. The hobo was an unacceptable topic for literature at that time, still is. In fact Burroughs’ two hobo novels are rather daring departures from tradition. There may be a genre of hobo novels, if so these two stories are bedrock of the genre. They may have been the first hobo novels published.
They were certainly intended as a tribute to Jack London. Although Burroughs acknowledges deep respect for London none of his volumes are found in Burroughs’ existing library. The library seems to consist of childhood books and volumes Burroughs purchased after he came into money. He doesn’t seem to have gone back and picked up old favorites. In such case we can’t know for sure how much of London’s Burroughs actually read.
London was prolific writing dozens of novels and collections of short stories along with some few non-fiction titles. Among the last was a record of his hoboing experience entitled: The Road. Published in 1908 there is a good chance Burroughs may have read it. An indirect proof might possibly be found in the sobriquet the Oskaloosa Kid. There is an Oskaloosa in both Kansas and Iowa. When London took his hobo trip from Oakland across the US and back by way of Canada in 1894 as part of Kelly’s Industrial Army he makes mention of incidents in Oskaloosa Iowa. If Burroughs read The Road the name Oskaloosa may have stuck in him memory.
London himself had difficulty getting The Road published as his publishers didn’t believe the hobo a suitable subject for treatment. If London ever intended a hobo novel he never wrote it. He did author several hobo related short stories. One can’t be certain which of the short stories, if any, Burroughs read. Certainly he couldn’t have read them all.
London was also sent to Mexico by the Hearst papers to cover the Mexican Revolution in 1914 so it is very possible that Out There Somewhere deals with the Mexican Revolution. Burroughs may have been more directly inspired by London’s Mexican dispatches.
In any event these two volumes are generally agreed to have a direct reference to Jack London with which conclusion I agree.
I did discuss the Bridge Trilogy in my Only A Hobo which elicited the response from fellow writer David Adams that I should have read Martin Eden if I wanted to understand Burroughs’ The Mucker. I had read it. I read it again. Unfortunately David failed to refer to the passages that would have enlightened me.
Reinforcing the hobo image of the two books is Burroughs use of hobo poetry throughout Out There Somewhere and the first half of Bridge And The Kid. Central to the first volume is HH Knibbs poem Out There Somewhere after which ERB’s story is named. The theme of that poem most important to Burroughs is that his dream woman or Anima awaits him in the South down by the sea. Weaving through these images and through Bridge And The Kid is Robert Service’s The Road To Anywhere. It doesn’t hurt to be familiar with these two poems.
If writing a hobo novel was avant garde, building one work around the work of another writer was no less daring. One can only say that ERB was fearless.
There is a possibility that Burroughs may have intended Out There Somewhere as an introduction to both Knibbs and London. He left for an extended stay in California shortly after completing the novel during which he may possibly have intended a trip North to Sonoma to visit London but his favorite author chose this unpropitious moment to cash in. November 22 is also the death date of John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley although forty-seven years later. If Jack hadn’t been in such a hurry he might easily have made it a three way termination.
It is noteworthy that Burroughs did extend an invitation to HH Knibbs who wrote the poem around which the novel was built and who did accept the invitation.
The hobo theme may also have been suggested by an increasing feeling of restlessness which resulted in the familial hoboing across the country after Out There Somewhere was completed in 1916.
Assuming the hobo influences of the IWW, London, Knibbs and Service, it would not seem necessary to look for others but Burroughs was able to cram more into a hundred fifty pages than any author I have read. On page one of Bridge And The Kid he mentions Sherlockian which refers to Conan Doyle, Raffleian which refers to the Raffles of Doyle’s son-in-law E.W. Hornung and the Alienist which refers to psychologists of some type.
Doyle was an ever present influence on Burroughs. His admiration for Doyle’s detective, Sherlock Holmes, permeates his work. He is forever trying to write a good detective story of which Bridge And The Kid is an excellent example if not the most perfect example of his Holmsian stories. A great many of his other novels have detective stories concealed within them.
Bridge And The Kid is one of the best. I’m sure everyone is able to guess that the Kid is a girl in disguise before the story ends but the question is how early? I don’t know exactly when I did but by the time the Kid went out to ‘rustle grub’ his relationship with Willie Case gave it away for sure. Still, even knowing did not diminish enjoyment of the rest of the story. Both Bridge and the Kid are excellent characters as was Burroughs’ detective Burton. Loved all three. Actually I loved all the characters including Beppo which were all drawn vividly.
One wonders if Burroughs knew that Hornung was Doyle’s son-in-law. If so the union of the two in one story is clever and piquant. Hornung and Raffles are probably not so well known now but Raffles was a very popular character for a long time. Whereas Doyle created the master detective his son-in-law created a mirror image master thief. Doyle didn’t take kindly to Hornung’s character, Arthur J. Raffles, for that was his name. Raffles was a gentleman thief or ‘amateur cracksman’ who stole from his hosts on country weekends. His sidekick was named ‘Bunny’. The Kid, Gail in disguise, is of course a counterpart to Holmes’ Watson and Raffle’s Bunny.
As a further inspiration then we have Holmes and Watson and Raffles and Bunny for Bridge and the Kid. Pretty amazing, huh? You can see why Philip Farmer got carried away in Tarzan Alive.
Then later in the book in a fit of exuberance Burroughs mentions H. Rider Haggard and Jules Verne although I can’t find references to their work in this story. Just ERB liked their stuff.
Finally we have to mention the Alienist. This certainly implies that Burroughs took more than a passing interest in psychology. As wide ranging as his interests were one is forced to believe that he knew who Freud and Jung were by 1917. What he knew of their work is open to conjecture although the story Tarzan’s First Nightmare of this period follows Freud’s dream theory pretty closely.
I would imagine he knew something of William James and I am convinced of FWH Myers. Beyond that I can’t say. It seems clear to me that Burroughs is attempting some careful psychological portrayals in this book.
Having discussed the preliminaries let’s see how Burroughs develops set and setting in this very delightful story of times, places and landscapes that will never be seen again.
Pt. II Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Accreted Personality
March 14, 2012
Part II
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Accreted Personality
by
R.E. Prindle
Time may fly but life seems long. Long enough for circumstances to alter your personality more than once. Consider for instance the National Guardsman secure in job, wife and family who is jerked out of his ideal existence to take a tour of duty in Iran or Afghanistan, foreign wars which betray the promises of his enlistment which were to defend his home state. Do you think a personality change didn’t occur when he received his notice? If he was kept in for several tours of duty over a period of years so that his former existence doesn’t appear to him as a dream that took place in a parallel universe? And if he comes home without an arm or a leg or, perhaps, both, that he doesn’t suffer from reminiscences or have a dual or multiple personality. You can bet he does. Nor does your life have to be as hard as the National Guardsman for your own personality to acquire personality accretions over your lifetime, all of which are stored in your mind and may be reassumed at any time.
As I said in the first part, these various existential states don’t disappear, they become part of your reminiscences whether suppressed or remembered and as possible fixations or idees fixe they influence your daily actions.
So now, let’s turn to the life of Edgar Rice Burroughs to illustrate the idea of the accreted personality. Psychology is simple if you don’t make it complex by mystifying it. I hope I can make Burroughs’ story clear without unnecessarily complicating it. I will try to use Occam’s Razor judiciously.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, who would become very famous as a fiction writer, entered this world of pain of pleasure on September 7, 1875 in Chicago, Illinois. He was parented by George T. and Mary Burroughs, he of Anglo-Irish ancestry and she of Pennsylvania Dutch, that is say, German. Eddie always considered himself pure English at a time when being English meant something, a much depreciated coin these days.
George T. was an upright man who had been an officer on the Union side in the Civil War a scant ten years previously. George Custer had not yet gone down at the Little Big Horn nor was Sitting Bull yet starring in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. George T. had two other sons, George and Harry, who were born just after the Civil War.
George T. was a whisky distiller while at this time the Whisky Trust was coming into existence. George T. was an independent sort who needed the Trust less than they wanted him. I don’t say the Trust was responsible but George T. was burned out. Chicago loved a good fire.
The relationship between Ed and his parents was not a warm one. His father made his life difficult, seemingly on purpose, while his mother seems to have been rather cold. Burroughs seldom mentions her nor were any of his characters named Mary, or George for that matter.
Nevertheless, born into a world of creature comforts with high expectations in a fine house on Chicago’s West Side with two Irish maids Ed began life in a happy state of mind walking down the street singing Zippity Do Dah or the equivalent. He stayed that way for about eight years until his first personality changing event occurred.
Eddie attended Brown School in his neighborhood. I haven’t been able to find out much about Brown but the schools stands out as special in Ed’s mind. The school had several prominent graduates one of which was the showman, Flo Ziegfeld. As Ziegfeld was Jewish it is quite possible the school was close to Maxwell St. Maxwell St. would figure prominently in Ed’s later novel, The Mucker.
One day when Ed was eight he found a big twelve year old Irish kid by the name of John belligerently blocking his way. It isn’t known whether he was walking with future wife Emma Hulbert or not but I suspect he was. At any rate John threatened to beat him up. Thoroughly terrorized Ed took to his heels and as he did so several suggestions entered his terrorized mind. To be in terror is to enter a hypnoid state in which all ones psychic defenses are lowered or discarded. Suggestions are easily fixated in your mind. Thus at the age of eight Ed’s original personality was submerged, he assumed his central childhood fixation. Not only was he emasculated on his Animus but, perhaps because he shamed himself in front of Emma, he transferred his Anima to John; he then set up John as his ideal of manhood wishing to be just like him.
The result was that John became his favorite name. In his future novels he named a disproportionate number of characters both good and bad John. His two key characters were both named John- John Clayton, aka Tarzan Of The Apes and John Carter of Mars. Both have the initials JC referring to Jesus Christ, one supposes. Thus on the masculine side their names commemorate John the Bully while on the feminine side Jesus Christ. Ed also wore a book under the assume name of John McCullough.
As Ed was shamed by running, defenses against cowardice are liberally sprinkled throughout his works with justifications for the advance to the rear maneuver, or running.
Particularly troubling to him was the occupation of his Anima by a male. Probably not very usual but given the limited range of responses available to humans, probably not that uncommon. But this result of the fixation was particularly troubling to him appearing in a succession of his initial output of the ‘teens.
The clearest exposition of the results of this fixation was reproduced in the pages of Ed’s second novel, The Outlaw Of Torn. The hero of the novel is a boy of Ed’s age on the street corner, who is the king of England’s son c. 1400 AD. The King has a quarrel with his fencing instructor, De Vac, who then avenges himself by kidnapping the son, Norman.
The scene is that Norman is playing in the garden under the watchful eye of his nurse/Anima when De Vac appears outside the garden gate- I. e. Ed’s mind- luring Norman to him. Norman has passed the gate when his nurse who had been chatting with another woman notices. She rushed through the gate where De Vac struck her dead. Thus his Anima was outside Ed’s mind when she was destroyed.
Now, this is the replication of a dream story. The meaning is that Norman/Ed was safe inside when De Vac/John caught him, as it were, with his pants down, killing and assuming the role of his Anima. The nurse represents his Anima or right brain which was then disabled.
So, as an eight year old boy Eddie has an emasculated Animus, left brain, and destroyed or shattered Anima, right brain. This has to be dealt with in some way so he can carry on and survive.
What Burroughs does then is create a myth to repair the damage as well as he can. De Vac now on the run with his prize who he must conceal takes Norman to a three story house in the slums of London built on stilts out over the water of the River Thames. The two live in this attic/mind for three or four years. During this entire period De Vac is dressed as an old woman. So, here we have the emasculated Animus combined with the dead Anima with the waters of the feminine flowing beneath the house, I.e. Burroughs’ self.
The two live this way for three or four years, Norman never leaving the attic. At the end of this period De Vac dons men’s clothes and takes Norman to a ruined castle in the Shires. The remarkable thing about this castle is that on one side, the right side, the roof has completely fallen in, can’t be used.
The interpretation is that Ed so identified himself with John that he had to put his own life on hold until he turned twelve, the same age John had been. At that point he recovered or began to recover some control of his Animus while his Anima remained destroyed.
De Vac then began to train Norman in the manly arts to be a killing machine to attain physical vengeance for De Vac on the King.
One can’t be sure of what effect the encounter had on his personality but the next year after the confrontation his father took him from Brown transferring him to an all girl’s school. George T.’s reason for this was that there was a fever going around and he wanted to protect Ed from it. How one would be safe from a communicable disease in a girl’s school isn’t clear so perhaps Ed’s father had another reason.
In Ed’s psychological state it is not unlikely that he went into a fairly serious depression while emasculated and crippled he may have become very effeminate. The placement in the girl’s school may have been one of disgust and to teach the boy a lesson to act like a man.
The humiliation on top of the emasculation was difficult for Ed to bear. He pleaded and pleaded to be transferred from the girl’s school. His pleas were heard although his father didn’t send him back to Brown but a couple miles across town to Chicago’s Harvard Latin School where Ed stayed through what would have been his Junior High years. During this period, the date isn’t clear, Ed fell off his bicycle banging his head against the curb; it isn’t known whether it was the right or left side. This left him dizzy and walking round in circles for three or four days, then the obvious effects disappeared. George T. then jerked him out the Latin School and sent him West to his brothers’ cattle ranch in Idaho. He doesn’t seem to have attended any school for the year he was in Idaho. However he learned to be a cowboy and had a great time.
Even without school the period was not without intellectual stimulation. George and Harry Burroughs were graduates of the Sheffield Scientific School attached to Yale University but not yet integrated with it, along with their partner Lew Sweetser. Sweetser was a fairly remarkable guy deeply interested in psychology when the subject was just beginning to assume its modern form.
William James had just published his two volumes on Psychology but I haven’t been able to discover who Sweetser’s teachers may have been at Yale. Departments of Psychology were rare at American Universities in the 1880s. However, as Sweetser apparently studied whatever psychology was available it seems certain that he would have been at least aware of Charcot’s experiments at the Salpetriere that were world famous. It is also clear that he was familiar with the idea of the sub- or unconscious. However much Ed may have retained, as he himself was relatively well informed on psychological matters when he began writing the foundations of his knowledge were probably formed at Sweetser’s knee.
Having left Ed in the wilderness for a year, George T. then moved him to the East Coast to Massachusetts’ Phillips Academy. Ed was now being moved around almost with the frequency of a military brat with its devastating personality consequences. Having consorted with a rough bunch of fellows for a year, Ed was now in an elite school without a great deal of preparation.
He was in Idaho at the end of Wyoming’s Johnson County War when the big ranchers squeezed out the small ranchers. Many of the small ranch soldiers whose shootings were classified as murders had fled to Idaho where Ed knew one or two; from the company of murderers, or killers at any rate, he was now in with a bunch of elitist schoolboys.
When his brothers had attended Yale their father had refused them an allowance that would have allowed them to associate with their richer school fellows as equals. If he continued the practice with Ed at Phillips then an extra burden was placed on the kid that would help explain his behavior. At any rate he assumed the posture of clown to gain acceptance while neglecting his studies. Naturally he was requested to leave.
Certainly he could have expected to return home and attend school in Chicago but this was not his father’s plan. His father enrolled him at the Michigan Military Academy outside Detroit billed as The Paris Of The West which is most laughable. This was the second great psychological trauma in his life adding another major accretion to his personality. Ed rebelled at being sent away again.
This was not merely rejection but also a condemnation of him by his father. As Ed saw the situation, with a great deal of accuracy, the Military Academy was just a holding pen for juvenile delinquents whose parents didn’t know how to handle them so they put them away in what was essentially an asylum or reform school where they could get some ‘discipline.’
Ed was horrified at these suggestions about himself coming from his own father. He rebelled at the rejection and its implications. He left the academy to return home or as his biographer Porges puts it, he ran away. George T. wasn’t going to put up with that. He collared Ed and dragged him back to Detroit, told him to stay put or…who can say or what? At any rate crushed and rejected Ed had no choice but to obey, but his mother and father died for him that day, slain by their own hand. Thus when Ed’s literary alter ego Tarzan came into existence in 1912 his parents had been slain by murderous apes and Tarzan was an orphan as Ed imagined himself.
General Charles King, Soldier and Author
Ed stayed at the Academy into 1896 when he was between twenty and twenty-one. He took the Commandant of the Academy, Charles King, as his surrogate father and mother. Because King was a captain in the Army, later a general, Ed decided he wanted to be an Army officer too. It is also noteworthy that King was a successful author of novels which Ed may have wanted to emulate when he too chose to become an author. One of King’s first novels was An Apache Princess while Ed’s first commercial effort was titled A Princess Of Mars.
Ed attempted in vain to win an appointment to West Point but failed. Then in 1896 while serving as an instructor at the Michigan Military Academy Ed foolishly abandoned his post choosing to join the Army as an enlisted man before the school term ended.
By now twenty years old his past with its many personality accretions had formed him. His original personality had been destroyed to be replaced by that caused by John. The accretions accumulated as he was shifted from school to school and West to East to MidWest leaving him dazed and confused while the final accretion of that youthful period was the devastating rejection by his parents all of which left him depressed and fatalistic. The high expectations of his childhood had been completely eliminated. The bright young boy had been transformed into a gloomy young man. But no former personality had disappeared; they all lived on in his unconscious where circumstances could revive any or all at the appropriate moment.
But, one is still alive and one must toddle on. Ed was not lazy or adverse to work. His intellectual interests were vast. He was a great wide ranging reader.
In the next part then, let’s turn to his personality forming accretions from reading and his general intellectual , social and political milieu.
Pt. I: Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Accreted Personality
March 6, 2012
Edgar Rice Burroughs
And
The Accreted Personality
Part I
by
R.E. Prindle
Dr. Pinel Unchaining The Inmates
The post-French Revolution period begins the rapid development of the Aryan mind. The Enlightenment laid the foundation of that development. Shortly after mid-nineteenth century the French astronomer, Camille Flammarion, was able to announce that Astronomy and Psychology would be the key disciplines of the future. The break with the religious consciousness of the past ten thousand years or so would be fraught with immense dangers, dangers which we are still combating.
The social ideology of the present asserts that all people are of the same stage of mental development. This is, of course, absolute nonsense. There are still hundreds of millions if not a billion or two who still maintain a stone age view of the world. Nor are all of them in other parts of the world, a vast number are here in the Americas and Europe. In addition there are billions still enmeshed in a religious consciousness while only perhaps a hundred million or two have actually evolved into the scientific consciousness. Hence we have the terrifically repressive attempted subversion of science by the Semitic religions.
So, it should be clear at first glance that not all people are equally developed or endowed nor are all cultures of the same value.
The French scientist and neo-romantic novelist Camille Flammarion noted mid-nineteenth century that the two most important intellectual disciplines for the future would be Astronomy and Psychology. I think that has proven true.
A major discovery of the century was the notion of the split or multiple personality. A term currently in use is Dissociation. Neither is accurate. I advance the term Accretive Personality. That is one’s personality is made up of many personality variations as a result of growth and experience. In periods of stress it is quite easy to escape oppressive reality by slipping into what is essentially an alternate reality or a parallel personality, if you will.
The Salpetriere
This was not a new phenomenon, merely the shock of recognition. In Greek mythology, for instance, when the stress of the mid life crisis hit, the hero went through a period of madness, that is to say he adopted a parallel personality until he was able to reorganize his mental attitude to new realities.
In Europe, under the stress of an insane quasi-Semitic religion in which Satan took a prominent role, it was common for the stressed to become ‘possessed’ by demons or, in other words, to split the personality. That is the person showed a parallel personality. The transition point to the beginning of secular understanding came when Dr. Anton Mesmer matched his secular method of exorcism against the ecclesiastical method of exorcism and won. So one might say that modern psychology derived from the problem of the dual personality- the Jekyll and Hyde effect. However dual or multiple personality was not recognized as such until announced in Jean-Martin Charcot’s clinic at the Salpetriere hospital in Paris in the mid-eighties.
Charcot studied hysterics. Hysterics are dealing with a lot of stress, hence escape through an alternate personality would be an easy choice. Charcot and the Salpetriere aren’t exactly household words so let’s take a moment to explain the situation in which modern psychology was born.
It is also necessary to bear in mind changes in scale. What is good for one stage of growth is not good for another. As the scale of things progresses from tiny to small to medium to large to huge to gigantic new forms have to be adopted to suit the new circumstances. These transition points are difficult to adjust to but once adjusted to are considered so normal that those who resisted the old change are equally resistant to adapt to the next level. Of course the young of each scale is born into it and has no adaptation to make although they will at the next change of scale.
Thus the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era masked to a very large degree a major change of scale so that after Waterloo a seemingly complete break with the past had taken place. It was a new world in the morning. So in the years leading up to the Great War another change of scale had taken place that masked the new world that popped into place in the twenties. I picked up the concept from that astute observer, H.G. Wells, who noted the emerging change in scale at the turn of the century. That great ship, the Titanic, that went down in ‘12 may be considered as representative of that change.
Thus with the change of consciousness that actually took place in 1795 the new consciousness became clear after Waterloo. Gone was the religious notion of ‘possession by evil spirits’ to be replaced soon by the concept of multiple personality. Thus whereas in the past the insane had been treated as raving beasts, chained to walls and whatever a Dr. Pinel at Paris’ Salpetriere began a more humane treatment with an attempt to understand the causes of insanity. The approach was parodied amusingly by Edgar Allen Poe in his story The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether in which the inmates revolted and took over the asylum.
The Salpetriere was a large compound of several acres with thousands of residents, mainly women from whom the subjects who became the hysterics that the great Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot began to study as a neurologist, as the early psychiatrists were known. The field of Psychology is divided in two. On the one side psychiatrists who must be MDs and who believe mental ailments are biologically derived and hence to be treated medically with drugs or, one shudders to think of it, operations like pre-frontal lobotomy or electric or insulin shock ‘therapy.’ Psychologists, who are PhDs with little or no medical training treat neuroses and psychoses as malfunctions of reason caused by experiential traumas.
Charcot as an MD originally sought biological causes for the hysteria he studied although he was coming around to a psychological viewpoint just before he died in 1893. Thus from being chained before Dr. Pinel released them these women, hysterics, while being confined to the Salpetriere were given freedom of movement within the hospital with its flowers and walkways making for a much more pleasant environment for them and one unobtainable to them on the outside.
Now, the great Dr. Anton Mesmer introduced hypnotism to Europe as a discipline in the years just before the Revolution. Naturally something so new and seemingly revelatory did not find immediate acceptance, indeed, it was treated as nonsense. Nevertheless people of learning, doctors, persisted in experimenting with it. Thus, when Charcot came to be the director of the Salpetriere, to the dismay of his profession he introduced the practice in his treatment of his hysterics and thus legitimized its use. Hypnosis, too, was new and little understood.
Pierre Janet
The essence of hypnosis is suggestion and Charcot did not understand suggestion. The rival hypnosis school led by Auguste Liebeault and Hippolyte Bernstein at Nancy to the East of Paris was aware of the effect of suggestion but not necessarily the nature of what it was. Actually suggestion is whatever enters the mind and is accepted. If one wakes to a beautiful sunny morning it is suggested to oneself that the day will be a good day. Acting on that suggestion, post-hypnotic one might say, one will try to make the day a great one to hang onto that feeling. The mind is naturally open to suggestion as it must be; in an active mind one can discriminate to some extent as to what suggestions will be accepted and which rejected. Under hypnosis in which the mind has been put into a passive state the ability to discriminate and reject has been greatly reduced so that a hypnotist can plant a suggestion that then becomes what Charcot’s associate, Pierre Janet, called an idee fixe, or in other words, a fixation that will remain in your mind until executed. This notion may be imparted by a human agent, books, movies, radio or any medium that is capable of influencing the mind. One must be aware of this. It isn’t necessary to have a hypnotist standing in front of you saying ‘look into my eyes.’
As I say, Charcot was convinced that hysteria was biological, that is to say caused by a lesion to the brain, so that while he hypnotized his female subjects at the Salpetriere he wasn’t aware of the nature of suggestion.
Marie Corelli
Now, the eighteen seventies and eighties were terrifically exciting at all levels. They did things differently then. As has been said: The past is another country; they do things differently there. The past is never to be judged by current standards although the latter are useful for comparison. Thus when Lister suggested that antiseptics ought to be used in the operating room his suggestion was stoutly resisted although true and nearly universally accepted today. On the other hand Evolution although true is more stoutly resisted today in a religious reaction than it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century so don’t feel all that superior.
While Charcot was arguing with himself as to whether hysteria was biological or mental, in the mid-eighties two of his associates easily grasped that hysteria was a mental problem. These two were Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet.
Freud at that time, 1886, was making the transition to psychology from medicine. He was an MD. Charcot was not alone in dealing with mental matters. The understanding of dreams for instance was developing rapidly. When Freud published his Interpretation Of Dreams in 1900 he cited dozens of competent researchers dating as far back as the 1860s. In 1886 alone two novels dealing with the subconscious and split personality were published, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde and Marie Corelli’s Wormwood. Corelli cites Charcot as an influence so she very likely had attended his semi-public presentations of hysterics under hypnosis at his hospital.
Sigmund Freud
Going back further, Freud, a German Jew, was undoubtedly familiar with the psychological work of the German romantics. At any rate he spent about four months at the Salpetriere studying Charcot’s work and methods. It is likely that the foundation of his psychoanalysis was laid there. While Charcot was struggling to determine whether hysteria was biological or mental, Freud, himself a neurologist, was able to perceive that, as he later put it, hysterics were suffering from reminiscences. In other words they fixated on past experiences which dominated their minds and behavior.
Pierre Janet, Charcot’s student and associate, came to the same conclusion probably at the same time. He expressed the problem more accurately when he determined that hysterics suffered from one or more idee fixes, that is a fixed idea or, in other words, a fixation centered around a specific past event or events.
Indeed, all the women at the Salpetriere had been battered and brutalized by life with no means of self-assertion or resistance. Unable to express their own will they retreated into ineffective hysterics finally ending up as semi-insane in Charcot’s hospital.
Now, split or multiple personality. No one, especially these women, have the personality they are born with. Over the course of our lives circumstances require us to respond in different ways, sometimes a personality is overwhelmed with a consequent personality adaptation or change and in extreme cases, insanity.
All very well, but what happens to the original and/or various personalities that were submerged. It is impossible for them to vanish from the mind so they must live on submerged by a more powerful personality impulse. Depending on the individual then, everybody must have at least one alternate personality. Stevenson and Corelli were demonstrating this in their novels.
The good Dr. Jekyll had had a wild streak in his youth that he forcefully repressed to become the totally respectable man of medicine. But, he longed for his rough and rowdy days so in Stevenson’s story he invents a potion, I’m sure whisky would have been just as effective, that allows him to free his original personality. In the course of his experiment the earlier personality suppresses the later one assuming control of Jekyll’s mind. Much the same thing happens in Corelli’s novel. Thus we have personality accretion.
Charcot’s hysterics, because of the side show atmosphere the Good Doctor created, became world famous, a sort of show people. Charcot even took them on the road for demonstrations and, heaven forbid, loaned them to other doctors for experimentation.
It was during one such loan in 1888 that Jules Janet, Pierre’s brother, made a startling discovery. He was experimenting on Blanche Wittman, the Queen of Hysterics, when having hypnotized her into what Charcot called the first state, instead of progressing to the second state, he decided to put her into a deeper trance. At that point Blanche was able to dissociate her personality from her normal state to what I assume was her original personality. She turned into a happy effervescent bubbly girl. In other words she had stripped every accreted personality adjustment to return to the period before society violated her womanhood.
One might ask where this personality came from? It is not necessary to assume either the supernatural or the paranormal. The personality did not come from outside her but was merely an early personality that had been submerged and denied existence by repeated abuse. If Jules Janet had pressed on he might have found three, four or more variations of Blanche Wittman. Indeed, when Charcot died in 1893 Blanche ceased having hysterical attacks and became quite normal assuming yet another personality although it was not recognized as such. She then took responsible employment at the hospital until she died under tragic circumstances.
Thus during one’s life one assumes many variations as one’s personal circumstances dictate. And one expresses them in many different ways. As an example of personality accretion I am going to use the history of the American fantasy and science fiction writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs. He has especial value as his biography is well developed and he has talked voluminously about his mental states through his large body of fiction which is all autobiographical in nature.
Dr. Jean Martin Charcot Demonstrating Hypnosis And Hysteria
Part II follows.
A Review: Wormwood by Marie Corelli
February 4, 2012
A Review
Wormwood
by
Marie Corelli
Essay by
R.E. Prindle
And Essay On Dual Personality From 1886 To The Present
Saginaw Bay In Winter
Key texts:
Burroughs, Edgar Rice: Corpus
Corelli, Marie: Wormwood, 1886
Ouida: Under Two Flags, 1867
Stevenson, Robert Louis: Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, 1886
Intro
When I grew up in Michigan not too far from the Saginaw Bay, in a good, cold winter the Bay froze over several feet thick. People drove their cars far out over it to laboriously dig holes through the ice in hopes of catching a fish. Then one day in late Spring when the warmer weather relaxed the bond of the frozen H2O molecules, if you happened to be there at the right time, a loud sharp crack not unlike thunder rose from the ice as the grip of winter ceased its hold and the tens of thousands of acres of ice began their metamorphosis back to water
As the water of the Bay began once more to heave they inexorably drove floes back on the beach in an incredible mountain or ridge of ice twenty feet high stretching for miles that began slowly to dissolve until in the early summer the beach was clear.
In Europe in the eighteenth century a similar process began in 1789-93 when the old social order with a similar loud noise began to dissolve until after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. A new world order became discernable as different as the ice and water on Saginaw Bay, yet clearly recognizable as the Bay under its two regimes. The reign of the fabulous nineteenth century had made its appearance. Now, at least Western Man had emerged from the cocoon able to assume its powers but first going through a growth period. This was a necessary but difficult period that produced differing results.
A number of conflicting dichotomies arose. Science struggled to be born while its religious antagonist refused to die. Old gods trying the swallow the new. The agrarian basis of wealth began to be supplanted by the Money Trust as the nouveaux riches paired off against the landed nobility. The money managers quickly became the new lords of the earth.
The old standard of slavery began to disappear with the end of the agrarian supremacy as after the American Revolution White Slaves were freed first, then the Black Slaves, the serfs of Central and Eastern Europe were liberated to a freedom they scarce knew how to use. Populations left the countryside to migrate to cities to work in industries as wage slaves until Henry Ford gave them independence and dignity in 1914. Change was everywhere as singers and dancers and fine romancers rose from being members of ignoble professions to become the most admired and wealthy members of the new world order far surpassing in wealth the old landed aristocracy.
The son of a servant and a cricket player, H.G. Wells, became a famous author and savant. Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes from nothing but his imagination and made fortunes while directing the future course of the world. Robert Louis Stevenson wove dream portraits and became a playboy of the western world. Reality as it had been known dissolved like the ice of Saginaw Bay.
Naturally all this very rapid change caused intolerable stresses on society and the personalities of its members as it and they struggled to understand the changes and organize the consequences of those flying changes. As a fact, the last known witness of Waterloo where Napoleon lost his bid died on 5/10/1904. She had witnessed it all from Waterloo to the Wright Bros. flight, if she paid attention to what was going on.
In 1886 two remarkable novels made their appearance on this incredible stage. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde and Marie Corelli’s Wormwood. Perhaps the subject of split personalities had been suggested to their intellects by the multitude of dichotomies cast up on the beach from the old world order to exist in conflict with the new. Perhaps it was the discovery and investigation of the unconscious mind as the unconscious was first exposed by Dr. Anton Mesmer just before the cataclysm began. Whatever it was, before Freud, it began the long investigation of dual and multiple personalities surviving to this day.
I concern myself here with the novelists Marie Corelli, Ouida and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Ice On The Move- Saginaw Bay
1.
As much as the revolutionaries would have liked to smash the Catholic Church and religion in general they only succeeded in ending its dominance of European culture which was indeed a good thing. In the process the heresies formerly suppressed by the Church were released to flower in all their glory plus a whole catalog of new ones created by Science. The more ancient heretical sects springing from the destruction of the Knights Templar such as Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism and, even, Satanism rapidly spawned a host of related sects not least of which was Spiritualism. Hindu and Buddhist missionaries began to proselytize Europe and the Americas. Related to these were the various Theosophical groups. Thus the Church had to contend with all these plus the Jews who were emancipated with the Revolution and thus placed on a par, as it were, with the Church and hence actual competitors for the soul of Europe.
Science had destroyed the intellectual basis of both Christianity and Judaism at the first blow; Darwin gave both sects a body blow in ‘59 so that after 1859 all was in a state of religious confusion. One consequence of the shattering of religious pretensions was that life after death was put in doubt. This loss was more than most people could bear who cherished an afterlife even if heaven had disappeared in smoke hence the efflorescence of Spiritualism which promised at least contact with the dear departed in some Great Beyond. At the same time psychology initiated by the discoveries of Dr. Anton Mesmer with the recognition of an unconscious was making inroads on ancient views of the mind. Scientists worked with Spiritualists in such organizations as the English Society For Psychical Research in the hopes of demonstrating life after death. While we today minimize the significance of Spiritualism at the time it was quite a serious matter. The writers who began their careers sometime after Darwin’s announcement of Evolution dealt with what we would call occult phenomena as a distinct scientific possibility if not probability.
Arising out of this intellectual milieu was Robert Lewis Stevenson (1850-1894). Coming aware shortly after the Origin Of Species was published he came to maturity during this important era of rapid scientific development. He captured the tone of the period magnificently in his novella Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. While not the first split personality story, Poe had explored the idea in various stories during the 1830s and 40s, his was the story that riveted world attention then and now.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Most of us I’m sure base our ideas of the story on the 1930s’ movie which differs significantly from the book being more involved with the sexual exploits of a sadistic Edward Hyde. His other side, Henry Jekyll, was in his fifties which means he would have been born about 1830, post-Napoleonic but wholly within the reign of Queen Victoria and the height of the Empire. While something of a rake in his youth Jekyll believes he has his wild side under control but longs for his rowdy ways. He would have been about twenty-nine in ‘59 so that he is more or less au courant in scientific ideas, apparently a chemist of some merit. Employing that skill he concocts a beverage that made LSD look as weak as tea, definitely more powerful than any single malt whiskey, which not only releases him from the restraints of conventional morality but physically converts him into a monster. Thus he splits his personality in two becoming alternately Henry Jekyll or Edward Hyde. While as mild mannered as Clark Kent when Dr. Jekyll he becomes the devil incarnate as Edward Hyde. But, of course you know the story, at least the movie version. Eventually Jekyll devolves from the civilized Jekyll into the demonic Hyde permanently.
Jekyll And Hyde
The dichotomy of Jekyll-Hyde symbolized and was probably suggested by the many dichotomies of nineteenth century society not least of which was the huge gap between the affluent and the impoverished, the educated and the brutalized, Science and Religion- Jekyll and Hyde.
The story electrified the English speaking world. Indeed two years later a real Edward Hyde stalked the East End killing women along the way. He was known as Jack The Ripper.
Perhaps at the same time in far off Chicago a thirteen year old Edgar Rice Burroughs read the book which made an indelible impression on him as we shall see.
2.
Something that is seldom mentioned is that Europe had quite a drug problem in the nineteenth century. The opiates were quite common. Laudamun may have been the first of the opiates, apart from opium itself, which was first created by the great Paracelsus sometime in his life between 1493-1541 which went through many changes before being marketed in England as a cough depressant. In order to calm babies mothers gave them a little dollop. So, perhaps a sizable proportion of the population had known opiates from babyhood.
Morphine was reduced by Friedrich Suternus in 1804, distributed by him beginning in 1817 and marketed by Merck from 1827. It came into its own in 1857 when the hypodermic needle was invented.
By the time of Marie Corelli’s novel, Wormwood, morphine was a recreational drug for society ladies.
Heroin was synthesized in 1874 being marketed by Bayer from 1895 to the time it became a controlled substance in the second decade of the next century. Bayer originally sold Heroin as a non-addictive replacement for morphine. Missed the boat on that one. Hard to believe that mankind was so backward in recognizing addictive drugs for what they are.
Cocaine was first isolated in 1855 from which point it began its career. Perhaps its most famous user was the fictional Sherlock Holmes and his 7% solution. He made his first appearance in 1886 along with Stevenson’s and Corelli’s novels. Cocaine’s most famous pusher man was the deviser of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who turned everyone within reach on during these same 1880s.
And while it little effect in the nineteenth century, amphetamine was isolated in 1885. Subsequently famously used by Adolf Hitler and Jack Kennedy.
In 1886 then, the thirty-one year old Marie Corelli (1855-1924) published her novel Wormwood in which morphinism took a minor role while the novel was
Marie Corelli
essentially a polemic against the use of absinthe, an alcoholic drink with apparently hallucinatory side effects while being essentially addictive. Marie Corelli while not being a household word today was one of the best selling authors in the world from 1886 to the Great War. I am newly introduced to Corelli’s work with her novel Wormwood hence can say nothing of her as a possible influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs. It isn’t obvious from Wormwood.
The relation of the novel to the split personality occurs when midway through the novel the hero, Gaston Beauvais, having been shocked out of his senses by disappointed expectations falls into a deep depression which is then abetted by his becoming an absintheur or, essentially, a drug addict thus assuming a second personality not unlike that of Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde also caused by drugs only more dramatically.
While absinthe didn’t seem to make much of an impression in England, although Ouida in her 1867 novel, Under Two Flags, does mention its use, according to Corelli in 1886 the liqueur was devastating the manhood of France.
As this novel opens Gaston is the prosperous son of a banker for whom the future seems to be clear sailing. Gaston is the proverbial good boy who is outstandingly proper in dress and ideas. He and his father are great friends with the De Charmilles family whose daughter Pauline of eighteen years has just emerged from convent school much as Corelli had in her own life.
Gaston is charmed by the female beauty of Pauline undertaking to win her hand. Being almost a total innocent, although she does not love- i.e. have a grand passion- for Gaston, she accepts. Gaston is elated as he pins his life hopes on this whimsical girl.
Corelli, who is believed to have been a lesbian, was certainly a man hater while placing womanhood on a pedestal higher than any man ever thought of. Thus the snake in the grass arrives as the aspirant priest, Silvion Guidel. While Corelli paints Gaston as a sort of humdrum fellow, Silvion is electricity itself, every girl’s vision of passion painted in high colors.
Despite his fair exterior and the apparent virtue of his calling Silvion is the devil in disguise, a seducer and a cad. Although herself aware of the psychological ideas of the time as evidenced by her references to the contemporary psychologist Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet Corelli merely draws her picture in such a way that eschews explicit explanations leaving only inferences to the reader to interpret. For instance she casually mention Janet’s idea of the Idee Fixe with which both Pauline and Gaston are possessed but says nothing about it. Thus I am uncertain whether I am reading into the story rather than interpreting her intent.
Guidel, and this interpretation is left open, arriving from the provinces to Paris, introduced into this society quickly sizes up the situation. In his hauteur he despises the simple trust of Beauvais and more to spite him than anything else charms and seduces the lovely airhead, Pauline.
This is not enough. Gaston and Pauline’s wedding date had been set. Within a few weeks of the wedding Gaston is allowed to learn of the romance between Pauline and Guidel. Further which Pauline who has always played the virgin with Gaston we have the first hint of an inference that she is with child by Guidel.
Corelli now poses a moral dilemma in which through her character of Helisie, Pauline’s cousin, she sides with Pauline because every woman lives for a grand passion that no man can possibly understand and hence must be forgiven and forgotten. Gaston is just an average guy; he expects Silvion to step up and assume his responsibilities. He has renounced his right to be a priest and should take Pauline off his hands. Having worked his evil Guidel is satisfied. Rather than face a duel with the enraged Beauvais he flees Paris for the safety of the Church and Brittany where he immediately takes orders placing him out of reach of Beauvais’ vengeance.
Corelli does not see the betrayer and seducer of Pauline as the cad he is but she sees Gaston who has no intention of now marrying Pauline who has distributed her ‘passion’, as the ununderstanding cad. Gaston is between the proverbial rock and the hard place which seems to escape Corelli. He must choose to either marry the girl or shame her by renouncing her. Horrible position for any man but Gaston gets no pity from Corelli, not where a woman’s grand passion is involved.
As Guidel makes no appearance or communication before the wedding day Gaston exposes Pauline’s shame and denounces her at the altar. The consequences are of course horrific. All the blame falls on Gaston’s shoulders who immediately not only loses the girl but all social caste. Having had the greatest expectations of happiness he is now plunged into the deepest of depressions. As the rain pours down he rushes from the altar to find himself a place on a bench in the Champs Elysee where he sits for hours drenched to the bone in the downpour. Very symbolic. There can be no more accurate description of his absolute despondency. His personality splits, he becomes a different man as completely as Jekyll and Hyde.
As the title Wormwood indicates the novel is meant by Corelli to be a denunciation of the drinking of absinthe in France. She equates absinthe drinking as a manly vice while she equates morphinism as a female vice. Thus these two twin addictions are destroying the flower of France in her eyes. In point of fact both absinthe and morphine became controlled substances within a decade or two.
As Gaston wallows in his despondency in the downpour an impoverished artist he had helped out a few times discovers him on his bench. The devil’s helper is always at hand. This fellow in his cynical way consoles Gaston while taking him to a bistro in which he introduces the susceptible Gaston to– absinthe. Absinthe takes the place of Jekyll’s chemical concoction. The result is the same as in all drugs as all sense of social responsibility is dissolved and what remains is a pure sense of self and – anarchy. As Shelly put it:
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a scepter shone;
On his brow this much I saw–
‘I am God and King, and Law!’
And so the course of the last half of the story is worked out as Gaston took his vengeance.
Of course there are consequences to drugs and the exaltation of self and the personation of anarchy. One loses one’s discipline and then one loses the trust of friends and family. And so Gaston neglected his responsibilities while naturally being unable to render a justification of his actions to his father. The end result is that he is cast away by his father.
But the beauteous Silvion Guidel, he of the fair face and lax morals has unleashed a train of horrors that can’t be avoided.
Pauline’s father, old De Chamilles, commits suicide- it was either that or challenge the innocent but increasingly debauched Gaston Beauvais to a duel. The shamed young thing Pauline also cast into a depression because her grand passion is balked leaves home to take up a life on the streets of Paris. Guidel having taken orders, because of his good looks is called to Rome to delight the Cardinals with his handsome presence.
This tale of degradation and woe moves rapidly on in a supremely well told fashion by Corelli. And then comes the denouement.
Gaston’s descent takes only three or four months from August to the onset of cold weather. Taking a turn through the Bois de Boulogne Gaston chances on Silvion and Pauline’s trysting place where his trust had been betrayed. There he finds Silvion who had taken unauthorized leave from his duties in Rome, in other words, he just disappeared, no one knows where he is.
Silvion, who in what he must have known was a mortal insult, asks how Pauline is. ‘You married her, didn’t you?’ Obviously his intent is to resume his liaison behind Gaston’s back. Once again Corelli lectures us on the necessity of this passionate affair before turning Gaston loose to throttle Silvion which he does to my immense satisfaction at least. I find my own moral judgments in direct opposition to those of Corelli.
Having now gratified his sense of injury on Silvion, Gaston still seeks vengeance of Pauline. She has successfully eluded all detection although Gaston has caught a couple of fleeting glimpses of her on the streets. Now, driven by the imp of the perverse, he determines to track her down. He comes across her singing for her supper on a street corner, a real Edith Piaf. By this time after several months of being an absintheur he is reduced to total anarchy. Being told that she is still in love with Silvion he goes into a grand passion of his own telling her that Silvion is dead and when she wouldn’t believe him he informs her that he murdered him with his own hands in their old trysting place.
Of course Corelli takes this opportunity to expatiate further on the grand passion every woman needs and the anarchic precedence this passion takes over everything else not unlike the absinthe or morphine. Pauline has a locket around her neck that she had worn when she and Gaston were engaged which he now discovers contains a picture of Silvion and a lock of his hair. Enough to drive a guy to any violence.
Pauline escapes his rage fleeing for that repository of souls, that which had taken Silvion’s, the Seine, and throws herself in. Good riddance of bad rubbish was my thought while Gaston was much gratified. One doesn’t have to guess Marie Corelli’s thoughts on this point in the history of a grand passion.
At that point Gaston’s anger is rectified so while the story effectively has climaxed an ending is needed. Like many a writer Corelli had her story supremely elaborated until her own psychical crisis was reached, her hysterical grand mal described by Charcot and then she has to limp along for fifty pages or so until she wraps things up. Still, the novel was a very satisfying read. Four and a half stars. If Corelli had studied her Ouida a little more she might have brought the prize home.
3.
Under Two Flags
In all the dichotomies of the nineteenth century none split the public psyche more than that of the conflict between science and religion. Nor has the split and conflict gone away as the recent recurrence in fundamentalist Jewish, Moslem and Christian sects reveal.
Indeed all three sects have hurled themselves with full ferocity against the science of Evolution. Nothing denies religion more. Indeed Corelli opens Wormwood with a troubled discourse on science contra religion. The conflict can probably be seen in the same light as that between Paganism and Christianity at the turn of the Age of Pisces. Science at the time was viewed as more or less an evil by the majority while that majority has only lessened its opinion by somewhat today.
The conflict with science, quite frankly, is that it denies the evidence of the senses and asks us to accept as fact, not belief, what can’t be seen except perhaps by extremely sophisticated instruments. The religionists make the Scientific Consciousness relatively dangerous too. While we might not have to fear for our lives as in previous centuries, too outspoken a criticism of religion, especially Moslemism, might result in one’s head rolling toward the gutter. College professors at that time had to be very careful. They were permitted to be ‘agnostics’, that is, they didn’t deny the probability of God but were allowed to doubt it. A little concession to science. Corelli appears not to be able to deny science but is troubled by the conflict with religion.
So, this is the social malaise which Freud forty years hence would call Civilization And Its Discontented. The growing demands of Civilization that divided the old ‘natural’ life from the new ‘artificial’ life was disquieting; made people uneasy. Thus in the mother of all French Foreign Legion novels, Ouida’s Under Two Flags of 1867 that author flatly lays the problem out. Life had already grown too complex for the average person to handle.
In Under Two Flags Ouida creates two lives for her hero, Bertie Cecil; thus while his psyche remains unsplit his career requires him to assume a totally
Ouida
different character. The first part showing Cecil in civilization is a superb novel on its own. Compelled, as it were, by his circumstances to seek ruin, Bertie fakes his death in a train crash then hopping the Med to Algeria he renounces his socialite life to enlist in the French Foreign Legion.
In the novel when it resumes his history Cecil has been a Legionnaire for twelve years. As the novel was published in 1867 it must have written in 1866 or perhaps if published late in 1867 possibly that year; Ouida wrote huge novels at the rate of one or two a year. Bertie must have enlisted in about 1855. The French conquered Algeria only in 1830 so that the Legion took form quickly as Bertie would very nearly be in the first draft. Ouida writes as though the Legion was ancient.
At the time of the story 1866-67 the desert had already become a vacation spot for the English, exerting an almost hypnotic attraction for them; the Garden Of Allah as the Bedouins called it. Ouida has already dissociated herself, in mind anyway, from loyalty to England and Europe. Bertie in Algeria is unresolved whether to live his exile from civilization with the Bedouins or the French. He stakes his future on the throw of the dice with a French commander; if Bertie won, to the desert; if the commander won Bertie would go to the French. Thus it is only by chance Bertie remains a European. However having once accepted the French flag, duty makes him loyal.
In his heart, and of necessity in Ouida’s, he regrets the chance that made him French. As Ouida says France was might, while the Bedouins were right. Never mind that the conquest was to remove the Barbary Pirates who had been plundering the European coast for centuries; never mind the conquest by the Arabs as far as France when the Eruption From The Desert seized European lands for Moslemism; in some curous way, the historical memory of Ouida and, indeed, the West, was obliterated. Not only are the Bedouins in the right but they live as Man ought to live, the ‘natural’ man some might say, the primitive, the good life. For myself I would find the social organization of the natural life far too oppressive, the social organization of Civilization suits me fine and the key term here is social organization, one is always under some social discipline and in the primitive one it is as a slave of the chief. Not for me.
Thus in the evolutionary process Western man is still too in touch with his primitive mind to feel comfortable with the new social demands of Western Civilization. So we have this Western love affair so in evidence during this period with a romantic, if false, appreciation of natural life in association with the desert- The Garden Of Allah as in Robert Hitchens’ novel of that name.
Now, while the authors of the central period of the Great Century were mostly born at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the new crop of writers beginning in the eighties were mostly born mid-century coming to maturity after Science had become fairly developed, certainly after Darwin. Mostly they lived past 1900 when technology changed the whole direction of society virtually creating a whole new civilization. One might say the new civilization was a cause of the Great War.
4.
Self-explanatory
As time moves along change is ever present. So we have Edgar Rice Burroughs who emerged as an author in 1912 some few years out of the nineteenth century although he was born in 1875 so he was familiar with that horse and buggy era. The mind set of those writers beginning in the eighties endured from that period to the Great War which put a period to the mind set which in any event was changing rapidly. There was a new mind set after the Great War.
As Burroughs was born on an average, perhaps, of twenty years after the group of authors, he was not a competitor for honors with them but what one might call a synthesizer of the whole body of ideas. Thus until after 1920 when his mind evolved into the new mindset he was a Jr. Member of the set. He shared the mind set of his seniors. To properly understand Burroughs then up to 1920 one must be ware of the problems his older contemporaries were addressing while Burroughs addressed all the problems offering what he believed were conclusive solutions. At the same time he wrote books in all of the new developing genres.
He found the desert romance particularly attractive as he wrote The Return Of Tarzan, partially desert romance, The Lad And The Lion, full desert romance, and Son Of Tarzan, significantly desert romance; in addition the last several Tarzans took place in Ethiopia while in several novels Arabs make slave forays into the South from the North.
The question here is did he read Ouida’s Under Two Flags? I haven’t found an absolutely clear pointer but in Return of Tarzan, the novel begins in Civilization in Paris corresponding the first part of Under Two Flags while Tarzan obtains an appointment as a French secret agent to travel to Algeria which would be equivalent to the Foreign Legion.
Burroughs doesn’t mention the Foreign Legion until his ambiguously titled WWII novel Tarzan And The Foreign Legion in which the Foreign Legion is a group of people Tarzan gathered around himself in Sumatra.
If Burroughs did read Ouida, which wouldn’t be unlikely, then it is quite possible that her Bertie Cecil was one of the inspirations for Tarzan, although in reverse. Ouida like Marie Corelli makes her hero extremely feminine often describing him as womanly with womanly attributes, very nurturing or motherly. He is consequently tender hearted about the enemy while being motherly and concerned for his fellow legionnaires in a manner that would have brought scorn on him in any military organization, but according to Ouida made him much beloved, a saintly figure. Quite a warrior in the field though.
Tarzan on the contrary is never tender; he spares no foe, gleefully, almost taking sadistic pleasure in dispatching his foes in what are often near pre-emptive strikes. There is a large measure of sadism in the Jungle Joker humor in which he delights in tormenting his victims, unless he merely rips their heads off. In many ways then Tarzan is Bertie Cecil turned inside out. Of course Tarzan’s thin veneer of civilization runs no deeper than his clothes and when he takes those off he reverts to pure beast. Tarzan does not equivocate.
Burroughs as he often says was fascinated by the notion of dual personality. While he couldn’t have been influenced by the movie Jekyll and Hyde, Stevensons’ book made a profound impression on his mind. As he said, he believed that all men were two people although maybe not as pronounced as Jekyll and Hyde but he does appear to believe that Jekyll and Hydes could be found in numbers. How pronounced his own disunion was he doesn’t say but a conception of Burruoughs the Night Stalker isn’t difficult to form.
Jekyll and Hyde and the two sides of Corelli’s Gaston Beauvais were chemically induced but Burroughs uses another device when he split’s the personality of Tarzan. In Tarzan’s case the roof usually falls on his head giving him amnesia when he rises as another man. Like Jekyll and Hyde usually Burroughs provides a physical duplicate so that two Tarzan twins, Burroughs even wrote a children’s story the Tarzan Twins, are wandering around one of which is doing things injurious to Tarzan’s reputation; a reflection perhaps on the problems Edward Hyde caused Henry Jekyll.
Thus in Tarzan and the Golden Lion and Tarzan and the Ant Men the Tarzan lookalike Esteban Miranda defames Tarzan by using the steel tipped arrows found in children’s archery sets.
In Tarzan and the Lion Man a movie actor impersonates Tarzan giving the real Big Guy headaches. In Tarzan Triumphant Tarzan himself impersonates a dandy named Lord Passmore. Perhaps an indication of the post-divorce Burroughs. It is interesting the psychological stress resulting in the splitting occurs around Burroughs sexual problems.
Throughout his work, especially to 1920, then, Burroughs recapitulates the themes of his elders of the late nineteenth century, more especially he concerns himself with the problem of split or dual personality. This theme would be further explored by writers following in his footstep beginning in 1920 when his own influence began to be felt.
5.
Maxwell Grant/WalterGibson
The New Era as the period of prosperity that began a couple years after the War and ended with the crash of ‘29 was known while seemingly a radical departure from the Victorian and Edwardian periods quite naturally took its origins from that recent past but many of the themes that Burroughs as the last of his era was exploring lost some of their significance or perhaps were transformed by the really incredible advances in science and technology of the first two decades of the century. The addition of Prohibition and the vote for women as the decade began also threw an entirely different cast over the period.
Not one of the least influential changes in the period was the influence of the success as a writer of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Between 1920 and 1940 Tarzan, himself, transformed by the talkies, had become more than a household word, indeed, he was a cultural artefact, one might say the grounding of the New, or Wold Newton, Mythology.
I don’t believe there was any writer working in the period who was not familiar with Burroughs’ writing and in some way influenced by it, not excluding the Man of Steel, Stalin himself. War was declared on Burroughs by the Germans in the first half of the third decade resulting in the banishment of his books from the Weimar Republic. Sic transit gloria.
Burroughs continued to turn out his volumes throughout the period referring frequently to the dual personality. Through his works, but not exclusively, the dual personality became a pervasive trope. A suggestion that one picked up subconsciously.
So many literary characters were doubles that one began to think of oneself as two people. Perhaps the most influential of the new crop was the playboy Lamont Cranston who may or may not have been himself during the day and the Shadow by night. Actually since Cranston was out of the country almost continuously he lent his identity to The Shadow, or so we are told. Figure that one out; how to be in two places at once. Most of we younger people were only familiar with the radio Shadow although the writer Maxwell Grant or, in his true identity, possibly, the magician, Walter Gibson wrote over three hundred titles for those with multiple idle moments to mull over and with a fondness for the trivial. Some historical interesting stuff though.
The Man Of Titanium
Doc Savage split his personality into five parts with his wrecking crew of paramilitary soldats. Savage would be recapitulated by Steve Rogers and his alter ego Captain America with his merry band of five. Capt. America arrived as comic book literature preceded by the first of the comic book double personalities, Superman, and his daytime identity, Clark Kent
The most spectacular of the dual personalities, those who I base my double on, were Capt. Marvel and Billy Batson. One event yet more dual than this. Billy Batson was a little crippled newsboy, just my age at the time, or seemingly so, who was inducted into the superhero Hall Of Fame.
Billy, a little orphan boy like me was out at midnight peddling his Gospel News when a mysterious stranger, not unlike the Shadow, asked the poor but honest lad: ‘Why aren’t you home in bed, son?’ Billy replied: ‘I have no home, sir. I sleep in the subway station, it’s warm there.’ Wasn’t too hard for me to identify with that.
The Mysterious Stranger or hand of fate points and says: ‘Follow me!’ Down in the subway he means. Billy being no fool asks: ‘Where are we going.’ Easily satisfied he receives the answer: ‘Wait and see.’
Suddenly a strange subway car, with headlights glaring like a dragon’s eyes, roars into the station, stops. No one is driving it. The MS intones: ‘Have no fear everything has been arranged.’
Oh, everything has been arranged. Every little crippled orphans’ dream.
The train drops them off into a cavern displaying the seven deadly sins. A propitious beginning. Believe me, this was close to reality for an eight year old kid, like me. The MS takes Billy and introduces him to this grey beard in a long white flowing robe. This is a guy with the unlikely name of Shazam but a guy everyone would want to meet.
Shazam was all virtue, been fighting injustice and cruelty all his very long life but without much success. He explains his name to Billy. The S stood for the wisdom of Solomon; H for the strength of Herecules; A for the stamina of Atlas (I could never remember that one, I knew what stamina meant too); Z for the all powerful mind of Zeus; A for the courage of Achilles (wasn’t sure who he was); and M for the speed of Mercury.
Shazam tells little Billy Batson:
All my life I have fought injustice and cruelty. But I am old now- my time is almost up. You shall be my successor. Merely by speaking my name you can become the strongest and mightiest man in the world- Captain Marvel! Speak my name.’
Billy does and boy! Talk about split personalities, the little crippled orphan becomes the strongest man in the world giving Superman and Clark Kent some mean competition which is why DC Comics sued him out of existence.
I already had the split personality at eight, and how, so I used to sit around shouting Shazam over and over waiting for the lightning flash that never came. There’s always just been me two, although I did get up to five for a while but now I have returned to one and have to be satisfied with myself. It isn’t easy being single when you’ve been double for so long. No one to talk to. But me? I take it easy, play it as it lays. Always have, always will. For the next couple years anyway, maybe, until I keep my appointment with the Grim Reaper. As the saying goes: My days are numbered.
As Eddie Burroughs believed that every person has a second self I suppose it may be true, at least Western Man; perhaps not as extreme as Jekyll and Hyde or Billy Batson and Capt. Marvel but a psychological phenomenon created both by evolution and the dichotomies created by the conflicts of the nineteenth century as well perhaps as the multiple conflicts of this global, multi-cultural world.
Say goodnight Ed I, Ed II, Ed III, ED IV and Ed V. Goodnight all.
Billy Gets His Personality Split
2011 in review
January 7, 2012
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 170,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 7 days for that many people to see it.
Pt. I: Edgar Rice Burroughs Rides The Rocket, A Short Life
January 3, 2012
Part I
Edgar Rice Burroughs Rides The Rocket
A Short Life
by
R.E. Prindle
ERB: What, Me Worry?
Eddie was a ramblin’ gambling’ man. He was born in a pair of ramblin’ shoes and he always took the most desperate chances. When he succeeded he was spectacular but when he failed…oh, well.
Perhaps the biggest gamble he ever took was being born but then, as Eddie always said: to me to conceive is to act. Things started out well as he began his life as a little prince but would soon turn sour when he was eight and lost a confrontation with a twelve year old bully on a street corner on the way to school. That was a life changer; he’d gone from prince to pauper and worse was yet to come. But, hey, it’s all education, isn’t it now?
The next year he began a foot race with the plague which he would ultimately lose. But as with being born he was initially successful. In an effort to escape the epidemic he was transferred to an all girls school. Apparently this was a polite plague selecting only boys. So like young Achilles Eddie took his place among the young ladies.
Still pursued, as one imagines, he was put for safety in a Latin School, one imagines as a place the fever would never look for him and if it found him would never enter the abode of such objectionable learning. Still, a young man of means he owned both a pony and a bicycle. The pony he rode back and forth to school leaving it tethered outside while he soaked up the classical knowledge. The bicycle he rode for fun but tipped over banging his head against a curb. This left him dizzy for days perhaps contributing to his later character which was formed by a similar incident.
While secure at the Harvard Latin School of Chicago for a couple years, the plague was not to be baffled forever. Eddie took to his heels running as fast as he could way out across the Western Plains to Idaho to become a Jr. cowboy. No box tops necessary.
If this picture is any indication he was quite a dude. Look at those chaps! The rowels of those spurs were so big they dragged on the ground announcing his approach from some distance. It was not all bravado however as he did have quite a way with the horses. Eddie was quite happy on the ranch and he might have become a Sr. cowboy but fate put some itchin’ powder in Eddie’s ramblin’ shoes and he resumed his ramblin’ ways. Doing an intellectual about face he and his guitar showed up at a Harvard prep school called the Phillips Academy. It was soon discovered that he didn’t know how to play guitar and hadn’t even learned any good cowboy songs such as The Streets Of Laredo, The Chisholm Trail and other titles of that ilk. Didn’t even know how to sing, either.
This disappointed the faculty, as well as his low grades, so that they couldn’t bear Eddie’s presence. Thus he was told to put his ramblin’ shoes back on and git along.
As you can tell, by this time Eddie was accumulating a fair amount of educational experience though not of the academic sort. Still of tender years and still outdistancing the plague Eddie had to find another educational emporium to fill out his youthful years. His father, actually the agent of all this agitation, for some reason thinking him a delinquent, did what all fathers of delinquent kids do, he enrolled the lad in a military academy. Supposed to make you learn to stand up straight or something like that. Yep. If the plague showed up there they’d most likely make him stand at attention until he got tired of it.
After all this ramblin’ Eddie was becoming quite a character. In addition to performing some typical goofy stunts Ed was a star rider on the Equestrian team as well captaining the football team as a quarterback. Just to put in some good words for Eddie here and raise him in your estimation, Ed led the Michigan Military Academy Tigers, or whatever they were called, to a draw against the mighty University Of Michigan Wolverines. Always an odd sobriquet I thought and in a competition between a tiger and wolverine which would you bet on.
Now, this nearly miraculous feat did not go unnoticed. He so impressed the Wolverine coach that Ed was offered a full football ride at Ann Arbor. Well, you might say, that was really wonderful. Yes, it could have been. But the imp of the perverse was down in those ramblin’ shoes as well as the itching powder as Eddie turned the coach down. If the offer had come from Yale that would have been different, but UM? Eddie had his heart set on Yale, which his brothers had attended, and it was Yale or nothing. Yale was uninterested.
That was a positive life changing experience that Eddie missed but fate was cramming the next few years with a bunch more, some of them very memorable. Plus the plague was waiting for him just around the corner. That was going to be a stunner.
First up was one of those glorious once in a lifetime experiences that only succeeds if you’re at the right age. Eddie was and he had one glorious summer in the year of ‘93. The Chicago Columbian Exposition. The promoters couldn’t get it together to open in ‘92 which would have been that actual 400th anniversary year of the intrepid navigator’s voyage but the promoters were ready in ‘93. Eddie was seventeen and spent the summer of his life at the Expo grounds.
I’m going to have to try to set the Expo up for you because in its own way it was the highpoint of Western Civilization before and since. Western confidence just began to sort of evaporate after the fair was over.
II.
Eddie In Wonderland
Built In A Matter Of Months
The nineteenth century was quite something. It was the century of magnificent discoveries and achievement. Society chooses to diminish those wonderful scientists by derogatorily calling them Dead White Men while sneeringly dismissing them. Pardon me, if I’m sentimental but those were the guys that made the present possible and I can’t admire them too much. They’ll always be my revered ancestors to me and not Dead White Men. Down with negativity.
Technology and Science just exploded as scientific research opened new and very broad vistas to human view that never would have been opened without them. The machinery was incredible. The accumulated wonders were first put on display at London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. Six million people wandered through. It was breathtaking as the world of tomorrow went on display.
Water Gate From Lake Michigan
The Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia followed as an international competition began to form. Next came the 1889 fair in Paris for which the Eiffel Tower was created to form the triumphal arch through people entered the fair. Boy, there was an eye opener. Over a thousand feet tall, 300 steps up to the first level and 300 more up to the second. Tough act to follow but out there on the very edge of civilization existed the city to do it. Chicago. Chicago itself was considered exhibition enough. The Iron Chancellor, Bismarck himself, said that his only regret was dying without ever having seen that Chicago.
By 1893 the conditions for a perfect fair had formed. Steam safely delivered hordes from across the seas and steam brought them to Chicago in long lines of Pullman cars pulled by a mighty eight wheeler. The conditions were perfect and Chicago had the men of vision to realize the perfect fair- and how! And there were men to commemorate it as it deserved. H.H. Bancroft published a large size five volume set displaying its wonders in detail
The setting on Lake Michigan was spectacular; a one of a kind creation, never since replicated or even close to it. The Century Of Progress of 1933 was but a pale imitation. If you’ve read The Devil In The White City you know a fuller description than I’m going to give here. The White City, as the fair grounds were called, was a fairy land, life as it could be. It contrasted with the Black City, life as it was, of everyday Chicago. Industrialism was a recent phenomenon in the nineteenth century so that in the giddiness of creation such things as environmental concerns and labor relations had been neglected or at least not seen in their true importance. Everyday Chicago was a grim place; Eddie often makes unflattering remarks about his home town throughout his novels. It was smelly, smoky and dirty with huge slums not to mention institutionalized crime. They’ve shut down the stockyards but the criminal mentality remains.
The White City in contrast was a city as it could be and should. L. Frank Baum would later use it as the model for his Emerald City. As there was great labor unrest in Chicago at the time the labor force was critical. Those who signed on were quarantined to the site while work was in progress so as not to be corrupted by the labor dissidents. They threw up some of the most massive buildings in existence, practically overnight. They created pleasure gardens and a whole pleasure island. They had the midway of midways, in fact the term Midway was originated at the Expo. In competition with Paris’s Eiffel Tower the worlds’ first monster Ferris Wheel was brought into existence. While in the US the Wheel was turned into a carnival ride now many European capitols display huge four hundred foot Ferris Wheels next to their Houses of Parliament. No US city does; even the original Ferris Wheel was dismantled and has disappeared into some junkyard, perhaps having been converted into the steel beams of a skyscraper.
Japanese Pavilion
The Expo not only featured the technological and scientific triumphs of that fabulous nineteenth century but all the intellectual advances; Francis Galton the English psychologist displayed his achievements; Frederick Jackson Turner announced his seminal work on the disappearance of the frontier; The Congress of World Religions set up its tent over in the Black City to discuss how religion was to meet the challenge of science.
One of the first of the body builders, The Great Sandow, performed his strength stunts and flexed his muscles giving Eddie the germ for his seminal literary creation a few years hence.
Imitation Zuni Cliff Dwellings were created, a whole Dahomian village was thrown up, staffed with real Dahomians brought over for the fair. Eddie was influenced by these but he really enjoyed the peep show- forty beautiful women, count ‘em, forty, on display for your delectation.
Dozens of huge buildings from nearly every State and country, art works created an instant museum to rival the great museums of the world. Just outside the gates, too late to be included within, the fabulous Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. History portrayed while it was still in making out on the Western Plains. As incredible as it may seem among the performers was no less than Sitting Bull himself, the engineer of Custer’s defeat at his Last Stand. Amazing. It’s all show biz, folks.
The White City shot up out of the beach sands and chiggers, existed for a few months and then it was gone, burned to the grounds by the labor malcontents of the Black City. Fire is the devil’s best friend. Before it was gone Eddie and his fellows from the Michigan Military Academy marched into that Sacred City like so many Greeks at Troy, in pomp and circumstance. The troops of the MMA strutted in while the band played on. It filled Eddie’s heart with pride. Five years later, slightly inebriated, he and a friend would hire a band parading along behind it through the street of downtown Denver. Let’s just say the fair entrance was one of those thrills.
The summer of ‘93 was one for Eddie to remember. In a few years automobiles would begin to fill the streets of the Black City. In the White City of ‘93 Eddie beat them to the punch driving fair patrons around in his dad’s electric Morrison. The Morrison wasn’t much in the way of self propelled vehicles, being little more than a buckboard with benches on it, but, there was no horse in front of it and Ed was behind the wheel.
There was so much at the fair that a casual weekend visit was merely the smallest of sips, a week was a swallow, two weeks perhaps a draught. Nobody could take it in, nobody, but Ed that is. He had the full three months of that glorious summer to walk the walks, cross the bridges, stroll the romantic Wooded Island to the fabulous Japanese pavilion, gape and take it all in. You’ve got to remember that in those days before movies, TV, videos and color photography bound in convenient volumes no one, or at least very few, had ever seen such things. The fair was the prototype for all the Disney Lands and Worlds now dotting the planet.
What Ed might have missed he may have spotted in a newspaper account, rushing back to the grounds to take it in. Not everyone would know how to use what he saw and experienced, Ed did. Even if it was impossible for him to understand what he saw at the time, Eddie tucked it into the back of his mind from which it emerged in dribbles into his fiction over the thirty years of his writing career.
How lucky he was to pass the Summer of ‘93 in this wonderland. Truly a life changing experience. Not the only one coming up, Eddie had a lot more awaiting him in what he described as a boring life.
III.
Life Begins To Get Serious
First up was graduation from the MMA and the year he spent as a Geology instructor there. Then at the end of the year a depression seized Ed, probably caused by his failure to get an appointment to West Point. He joined the Army anyway leaving the MMA in the lurch while asking for the worst post in the Army’s jurisdiction. He got it. He was very lucky the Army wasn’t the French Foreign Legion or they might have assigned him to a post that made hell look a luxury resort, with no way out. The Army was more considerate, they sent him to Fort Grant in Arizona which was a few degrees cooler than hell although the accommodations were not much better.
The bad news was that Ed was in the Army finding this particular life changing experience, decidedly unpleasant; the good news was that Eddie really liked the desert and the Apaches. Zane Grey beat him to the punch writing about it but Eddie read Zane’s books assiduously. Both Arizona and Southern Utah, the border was disputed at that time, formed an irresistible attraction to him and he and Emma in their later years of marriage returned to it often. Even as Eddie was sadly contemplating divorcing this woman who had stuck with him through thick and thin, he retreated to the White Mountains Apache Reservation to ponder his situation. A deep respect for the Apaches was another consequence of his abbreviated tour of duty. Abbreviated because Ed developed what the Old Timers called a ‘tobacco heart’ and Ed had his dad use his influence to get him out. When the going got tough Eddie always took off running. He remembered that street corner in Chicago.
Well there he was, nearly twenty-five years old with no directions home although he did find his way back to Chicago, a story in itself, which I’m not going to tell here, but fragments of it can be found in The Return Of The Mucker. Ed knew how to use every scrap of his experience to advantage. For a couple years Ed hopped back and forth between Chicago and Idaho where his brothers were still running the ranch where Eddie earned those gigantic spurs.
It was on one of these trips he and an old Army buddy, a member of the Might Have Seen Better Days Club of that brief Army period, hired the band in Denver. It was also in Denver that Ed showed his gambling proclivities losing the money to cover the stretch from Denver to Idaho. As the baby brother, Big Brother Harry covered his act but Ed had set a dangerous precedent.
Part of the reason for Ed’s motation at this particular stage of his life was the maturing of his relationship with future wife Emma. As girls often do, she matured faster than Eddie and hearing her biological clock ticking was ready for the altar. Time was no longer on her side. Whether she could have ever rustled Ed out of bachelorhood is a topic for some rumination if she wasn’t at the same time being courted also by a rich handsome young fellow by the name of Frank Martin. Irish; always a red flag for Eddie who had some Irish blood of his own but considered himself a full blooded English type.
Rich and Irish. Franks’ dad was a big railroad magnate. Had his own private car to hitch at the back of the train. Well, to make a long story short Frank correctly discerned Ed’s intentions of wanting to remain a bachelor yet keep Emma on his string. Ed would go away but he wouldn’t stay away. Frank sat down and thought for a while, perhaps between breakfast and lunch, and thought he had devised a way to keep Eddie away…permanently.
It was a good plan and should have worked but it didn’t. Frank had his dad hook up the private car to a New York City bound train and then invited Ed along for the ride. Our Blithe Spirit got on the train without a qualm. One should never trust the other guy in matters concerning love or money. There are some guys who take the old saying everything’s fair in love and war quite seriously. Ed was to be given the coup de grace in Toronto on the way back. The boys went to the Toronto equivalent of Chicago’s Levee for a night’s entertainment. A couple thugs approached Ed flashing a black jack of sufficient weight and criminal dexterity to kill him but the coup and the grace separated. Ed was down and bloody but he survived. He promptly went back to Chicago and married Emma to keep her out of Frank’s hands. Now it was Frankie’s turn to cry.
We know he was a sore loser and if he didn’t stalk Ed he didn’t let him out of his sight either. Thirty-four years later when Ed and Emma parted Frank’s man Patchin was sent to LA to gloat over the divorce. Even when Eddie died, Frank had preceded him, Patchin sent a mocking letter to Ed’s son.
What I’m leading up to here is not even conjecture but just a bit of imagination, but since I know more than I’m telling, a possibility. As I pointed out for the last twenty years Ed had been dodging the plague; in 1901 he turned a corner and there he was face to face Mr. Typhoid Fever. Fever shook his hand and that was it. Eddie was down and almost out. It was a terrible bout but Ed did survive or else I might be writing about Zane Grey, a decidedly stuffy creature in whom I have no interest.
It was only a little over a year since Frank had been aced out of Emma. Definitely not long enough to cool off his hot Irish temper. A man who will attempt murder once will hold a long grudge and we know that Martin never stopped thinking of Emma and Ed. It may sound far fetched and may be it is, but as Ed caught the Typhus a year or so after snagging Emma I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Frank Martin passed a stolen bacillus on to Ed in some way. Certainly he couldn’t have him assaulted again, an accident might have been difficult, so perhaps he introduced the disease into Ed’s food in some way. Just a suspicion.
Eddie didn’t bounce back to his feet but while he convalescing a very important book to him was issued which he devoured as it appealed to his romantic soul. He would read Owen Wister’s Virginian six or seven times by 1920. If one looks at in this way Ed made several attempts to escape Chicago until he finally succeeded in 1919. If one looks at it like that, as I say, Ed fled with Emma in 1903, 1913, 1916 and 1919.
I always look for a chain of events, the reason why. Wister’s The Virginian has a terrific reputation although it is one of those classics that leaves me cold. Wister was one of Teddy Roosevelt’s buddies. The book he wrote smells like a Gent roughing it in the wilds. Perhaps the appeal to Ed. On the one hand the novel deals with the Johnson County Range War in Wyoming of which Eddie was peripherally associated when he was an Idaho cowboy in ‘91. Several of the rebels who had killed men fled Wyoming while one or two went into hiding in Idaho. Ed apparently knew one of these desperadoes so The Virginian would have had a personal interest for him.
The love story of the book concerns a rough hewn poorly educated cowboy and a school teacher much above him who he woos and wins. They then wed while for their cowboy honeymoon the hero takes his new wife out into the picturesque mountains of Wyoming.
IV.
Buttons And Bows.
A Western ranch is just a branch
Of Nowhere Junction to me.
Give me that city
Where the living’s pretty
And the girls wear finery.
Ray Evans, Buttons and Bows
From Paleface of 1948 starring Bob Hope.
I haven’t read a study on Ed that gave any attention to understanding Emma or her history and yet she was a key figure in his success while after Ed divorced her his production declined in both quantity and quality. It would seem then that whatever drove him as a writer was connected to Emma
There were striking differences between Ed and Emma. Whereas Ed was shifted not only from school to school but from Illinois to Idaho to Massachusetts and finally to Michigan, Emma continued on at Brown School to graduation giving her a much more stable outlook on life. After graduation she studied voice in Chicago becoming familiar with the higher culture while Ed was much more familiar with the lower reaches of culture. Emma would often chide Ed for his lack of culture as he preferred boxing to opera and in later life would become a devotee of professional wrestling with all its vulgar connotations.
The Hulberts, Emma’s family, considered themselves as high class people and, indeed they were. Thus when Frank Martin came calling Emma’s father, Alvin was overjoyed finding Frank a perfect match for his daughter. Alvin quite frankly despised Eddie considering him a ne’er do well and young failure. There was certainly enough evidence to support his point of view. Before the marriage, in order to encourage Frank’s attentions to his daughter, Ed was forbidden the house. And yet Emma had her heart set on Ed and would have him. Apparently her affection never wavered although her opinion of her husband varied. As it would turn out Alvin’s view of the marriage was much more correct than Emma’s. She should have listened to her papa.
As a young girl and woman the Hulberts treated Emma to the best of everything. While her heart was set on Ed, it is obvious that she dated during all those years when Ed was not in Chicago. It is important to remember that Ed was from Chicago but his youth was spent elsewhere so that he was only faintly culturally of Chicago.
Emma was a clotheshorse. As the pictures show she was used to finery. Those are not only a lot of clothes she’s wearing but fairly expensive clothes. Clothes that Ed definitely could not provide her during the first decade or so of their marriage. When he did come into his money it was his pride that Emma could buy any clothes she wanted and he was happy to have her do so.
So, Ed, his head spinning from the Toronto bashing, and woozy from his fever attack, never particularly stable anyway, conceived the notion of taking Emma to the foothills of Idaho to reenact Wister’s novel. In 1903 then, Ed packed Emma and all their belongings to catch a train to Idaho riding baggage with Emma and their dog.
We have no record as yet of what Emma may have thought of this or whether she protested vehemently being overruled by Ed’s unreasoning passion. Of course between bashing, fever and excruciating headaches anyone might be excused erratic but innocent behavior.
Emma Riding Baggage Dressed Chicago Style
Perhaps she objected using an analogous argument to Ray Evans’
My bones denounce the buckboard bounce
And the cactus hurts my toes
Let’s stay here where gals keep usin’
Those silks and satins and linen that shows
And I’m all yours in buttons and bows.
If she did use such an argument she was still in the baggage car with Ed and the dog.
I’m sure the trip was wildly romantic to Ed. His dad’s battery factory was on Madison, the hobo main stem so that I’m sure Ed had discussed the hobo life with them. His 1915 novel The Return Of The Mucker would celebrate the hobo life style as well as its successor The Oakdale Affair. So there they were, he, Emma and the dog in the baggage car like three hoboes.
Look at the picture of Emma in her finery standing in the boxcar. The look on her face echoes the lyric:
Don’t bury me in this prairie
Take me where the cement grows
Let’s go back to where I’ll keep on wearin’
Those frills and flowers and buttons and bows
Rings and things and buttons and bows.
I wonder if that was what was going through her mind.
Those long skirts didn’t work well out in the brambles, Emma didn’t have any other clothes, probably wouldn’t have worn pants if available, nor was Emma entranced with the one room balloon shack Ed threw up so their stay way out there was romantic to only one of them and of short duration.
Ed And Emma Dressed To Kill In The Wilds Of Idaho
Now comes an event painful to relate. Emma in her finery is way out there feeling miserable while Ed having removed wife and possessions to the romantic wilderness has only forty dollars in his pocket with no way to earn more. He was a rambler, he was a gambler.
Ed’s brother Harry was off in Parma so he and Emma went down to the station to catch a train to visit Harry. They had to put up for the night in what passed for a hotel room above the saloon. To this point in her life Emma had never even thought of roughing it and now she was learning all about it. To compound matters Eddie kissed her goodbye just like in Frankie and Johnny and went downstairs to find a poker game. His head must really have been hurting. They could have written the song Stagger Lee about him.
Well, he started with forty dollars thinking to inflate his stake to sixty or maybe eighty dollars but fate decreed that he come away with empty pockets. The possible reward wasn’t worth the risk. He had to have been playing with sharpies who took his cash and commiserated with his hard luck.
Let me illustrate how slick it can be. I was nineteen on the California Zephyr and two would be sharpers were trying entice me into a game of poker. They were really obvious and I wasn’t biting, I’d already dealt with sharpers aboard ship and come away cleaned. But, the railroad had an employee on board who must have been an amateur magician, he knew his cards. Dressed like a hick, walking and talking like one, he bustled up with his own deck of cards, invited me to stay, probably would have given me the best hands I’d ever seen because he meant me well, but I wasn’t really interested. Anyway he cleaned those two guys out in ten minutes and bustled off the way he came. They sat there stunned.
Now, I wasn’t present at the game Ed was in but I’d be totally amazed if those boys didn’t have a good laugh and dinner at Ed’s expense. Bad luck, good luck, Ed now stood at the bottom of the stairs swallowing hard, trying to figure out just how he was going to explain their dilemma to Emma. To be short about it, this was another one of those life changing experiences for Ed. No, sir, Ed didn’t have an explanation that Emma would accept. I mean, she could have married a millionaire and here she was in a wretched so-called hotel room a thousand miles from nowhere without a dime. Think about it. What was going through her mind?
Their relationship changed right there. It was a change that Ed would never be able to overcome; I’m sure it was the primary cause for the divorce thirty years later as Emma could never forget while Ed could never get over his shame. But, Ed hung in there for now. He recorded much of this period in his novel The Girl From Ferriss’s While a romanticized view of the years between 1900 and 1922 can be found in Marcia Of The Doorstep when Ed was again in hot water for overextending himself financially in LA.
I’m sure the railroads had a bitter taste for Ed after Frank Martin and Toronto. The memory of that private car shone in Ed’s mind like a diamond, but for now he took a job on the Oregon Shortline as a yard policeman in Salt Lake City. That is until Emma rebelled at taking in boarders ordering Ed to take her back to Chicago:
Let’s move back to that big town
Where they love a gal by the cut o’ her clothes
And I’ll stand out in buttons and bows.
Ed had a garage sale or whatever they called them back then actually selling Emma’s ornately carved marriage bed for a pittance. I’m sure that left a little scar too. Then, perhaps because Emma ragged him about riding baggage he bought a couple first class tickets back to the Black City which now appeared blacker than ever, I’m sure.
Ed was now a lost boy with responsibilities. The next seven years must have been a period of the blackest despair for him. He just couldn’t get his act together. He wandered from job to job. He landed a job at Sears, Roebuck that was a good job paying three thousand dollars a year. Not bad money in those days when unskilled labor worked six twelve hour days for from five hundred to seven-fifty a year. Ed’s prospects were good. He probably could have moved up into the five to ten thousand class in a few years. He showed up at his front door saying: Honey, I quit. Emma’s reaction wasn’t recorded but I’m sure it was voluble.
And then, of course, there were the pencil sharpeners. Ed never did sell one but he did sit down and write half of A Princess Of Mars. Who would have believed it? Munsey’s Magazine to who he had submitted it asked for the other half and gave him four hundred dollars to boot. Whether Ed and Emma sensed it or not they were on their way aboard the rocket, ready to ride.
We all hope for the success of our wildest dreams but few if any of us are prepared to manage the consequences of that success. It’s not as easy as it might seem. It’s sort of like the town bum spending a dollar for a lottery ticket and getting fifty million in return. If the bum thought he knew money before he is now introduced to the real thing.
For Ed who in his conception was born a prince, made a pauper, spending decades in disappointed expectations, now realized his destiny again. Upbraided by Emma for being a poor provider he was now in a position to provide her every desire, after taking care of his first, of course. The past weighed heavy on Eddie. The difficulties of his courtship and the shame of that gambling night in Idaho had to be rectified, reversed.
It couldn’t be, of course. One’s failures can only be recognized, accepted and lived with. But in a frenzy Ed thought that by repeating the private car incident and the disastrous trip to Idaho he could wash away the stains. Thus, having established a market for his goods, most especially with the creation of his ‘meal ticket’ Tarzan, Ed did an incredible thing. Remember he still had no money in the bank, betting entirely on the come.
As with Idaho he packed up all his goods including his useless second hand car, wife and by now three kids, bought five first class tickets to San Diego and made another attempt at fleeing Chicago. First class wasn’t the same as a private car but it was pretty close so Ed hopefully erased the shame of Frank Martin’s trip to New York City and back.
Once in San Diego, which stay lasted nine months, or long enough to be born again as the New Ed, he must have lived a princely existence going through most of the ten thousand he earned that year while returning to Chicago as broke as he had been when he and Emma boarded the train in Salt Lake City. So, he tried to eliminate his shame.
Once back in the Black City, having sold his production while in San Diego, he wrote some more, sold some more and made a seamless transition from the old Ed to the reincarnated Ed.
I would imagine that part of the plan was to get Tarzan published as a book and with that money establish himself as a man of means in his old home town. Move on up to the Gold Coast.
That would seem to be a very reasonable plan from our point of view but it was not that easy. Perhaps Tarzan, which is pure fantasy of the extravagant kind went well beyond publisher’ literary expectations. No one would touch it then, even though from our perspective the story was pure gold as, indeed, it turned out to be although not for Ed. Perhaps the novel appeared to the literary taste of Ed’s day as comic books did to literary lights in the forties and fifties of the last century, something to be burned and banned, hence Ed’s success was of the bastard sort.
He finally did get his novel published in book form in 1914 but he was stripped of most of the financial benefits as it went almost directly to reprint publishers; thus his royalties were more than halved and mere pittances of what they might have been. Still, by the time royalties began to come in Ed had created a backlog of Tarzan novels so that with current production one a year would be published for about ten years.
As the profit motive didn’t seem to be activating his publisher, the Chicago firm of McClurg’s, Ed was reduced to pleading with them to print at least twenty to thirty thousand copies before a novel was sent to the reprint house. It seems incomprehensible that McClurg’s wouldn’t do so on their own but they obstinately refused to make money for themselves and hence for Ed.
Well, the records, as I’ve been told, have been destroyed so what’s to be said. Once again I suspect outside interference. McClurg’s was an Irish house; Frank Martin was Irish. McClurg’s a was semi-public company open to investors one assumes; Frank Martin had money to invest. Until a better explanation is provided I have to believe something along those lines was happening.
But, if Eddie could have lived long enough the wonders he would have seen. At one hundred he would have been a very rich man. Those successful intellectual properties just keep gaining in value. Better than stamp collecting.
While Ed appears to have been stymied at the publishing end, that enterprise was old hat, the new wonder of the authorial imagination was movies. The Big Money, to quote John Dos Passos, Thus to some extent the movies made up for what Ed was being cheated out of in publishing. The first film production of Tarzan was the industries first million grosser. Thus when Ed successfully fled Chicago in 1919 his income was ten times what it had been in 1913. If his work was disparaged, as the say goes, he laughed all the way to the bank. Ed left Chicago with his pockets jingling.
Next: Part II: If Pigs Had Wings
Edgar Rice Burroughs Rides The Rocket: A Short Life
Eddie was a ramblin’ gambling’ man. He was born in a pair of ramblin’ shoes and he always took the most desperate chances. When he succeeded he was spectacular but when he failed…oh, well.
Perhaps the biggest gamble he ever took was being born but then, as Eddie always said: to me to conceive is to act. Things started out well as he began his life as a little prince but would soon turn sour when he was eight and lost a confrontation with a twelve year old bully on a street corner on the way to school. That was a life changer; he’d gone from prince to pauper and worse was yet to come. But, hey, it’s all education, isn’t it now?
The next year he began a foot race with the plague which he would ultimately lose. But as with being born he was initially successful. In an effort to escape the epidemic he was transferred to an all girls school. Apparently this was a polite plague selecting only boys. So like young Achilles Eddie took his place among the young ladies.
Still pursued, as one imagines, he was put for safety in a Latin School, one imagines as a place the fever would never look for him and if it found him would never enter the abode of such objectionable learning. Still, a young man of means he owned both a pony and a bicycle. The pony he rode back and forth to school leaving it tethered outside while he soaked up the classical knowledge. The bicycle he rode for fun but tipped over banging his head against a curb. This left him dizzy for days perhaps contributing to his later character which was formed by a similar incident.
While secure at the Harvard Latin School of Chicago for a couple years, the plague was not to be baffled forever. Eddie took to his heels running as fast as he could way out across the Western Plains to Idaho to become a Jr. cowboy. No box tops necessary.
If this picture is any indication he was quite a dude. Look at those chaps! The rowels of those spurs were so big they dragged on the ground announcing his approach from some distance. It was not all bravado however as he did have quite a way with the horses. Eddie was quite happy on the ranch and he might have become a Sr. cowboy but fate put some itchin’ powder in Eddie’s ramblin’ shoes and he resumed his ramblin’ ways. Doing an intellectual about face he and his guitar showed up at a Harvard prep school called the Phillips Academy. It was soon discovered that he didn’t know how to play guitar and hadn’t even learned any good cowboy songs such as The Streets Of Laredo, The Chisholm Trail and other titles of that ilk. Didn’t even know how to sing, either.
This disappointed the faculty, as well as his low grades, so that they couldn’t bear Eddie’s presence. Thus he was told to put his ramblin’ shoes back on and git along.
As you can tell, by this time Eddie was accumulating a fair amount of educational experience though not of the academic sort. Still of tender years and still outdistancing the plague Eddie had to find another educational emporium to fill out his youthful years. His father, actually the agent of all this agitation, for some reason thinking him a delinquent, did what all fathers of delinquent kids do, he enrolled the lad in a military academy. Supposed to make you learn to stand up straight or something like that. Yep. If the plague showed up there they’d most likely make him stand at attention until he got tired of it.
After all this ramblin’ Eddie was becoming quite a character. In addition to performing some typical goofy stunts Ed was a star rider on the Equestrian team as well captaining the football team as a quarterback. Just to put in some good words for Eddie here and raise him in your estimation, Ed led the Michigan Military Academy Tigers, or whatever they were called, to a draw against the mighty University Of Michigan Wolverines. Always an odd sobriquet I thought and in a competition between a tiger and wolverine which would you bet on.
Now, this nearly miraculous feat did not go unnoticed. He so impressed the Wolverine coach that Ed was offered a full football ride at Ann Arbor. Well, you might say, that was really wonderful. Yes, it could have been. But the imp of the perverse was down in those ramblin’ shoes as well as the itching powder as Eddie turned the coach down. If the offer had come from Yale that would have been different, but UM? Eddie had his heart set on Yale, which his brothers had attended, and it was Yale or nothing. Yale was uninterested.
That was a positive life changing experience that Eddie missed but fate was cramming the next few years with a bunch more, some of them very memorable. Plus the plague was waiting for him just around the corner. That was going to be a stunner.
First up was one of those glorious once in a lifetime experiences that only succeeds if you’re at the right age. Eddie was and he had one glorious summer in the year of ‘93. The Chicago Columbian Exposition. The promoters couldn’t get it together to open in ‘92 which would have been that actual 400th anniversary year of the intrepid navigator’s voyage but the promoters were ready in ‘93. Eddie was seventeen and spent the summer of his life at the Expo grounds.
I’m going to have to try to set the Expo up for you because in its own way it was the highpoint of Western Civilization before and since. Western confidence just began to sort of evaporate after the fair was over.
II.
Eddie In Wonderland
The nineteenth century was quite something. It was the century of magnificent discoveries and achievement. Society chooses to diminish those wonderful scientists by derogatorily calling them Dead White Men while sneeringly dismissing them. Pardon me, if I’m sentimental but those were the guys that made the present possible and I can’t admire them too much. They’ll always be my revered ancestors to me and not Dead White Men. Down with negativity.
Technology and Science just exploded as scientific research opened new and very broad vistas to human view that never would have been opened without them. The machinery was incredible. The accumulated wonders were first put on display at London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. Six million people wandered through. It was breathtaking as the world of tomorrow went on display.
The Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia followed as an international competition began to form. Next came the 1889 fair in Paris for which the Eiffel Tower was created to form the triumphal arch through people entered the fair. Boy, there was an eye opener. Over a thousand feet tall, 300 steps up to the first level and 300 more up to the second. Tough act to follow but out there on the very edge of civilization existed the city to do it. Chicago. Chicago itself was considered exhibition enough. The Iron Chancellor, Bismarck himself, said that his only regret was dying without ever having seen that Chicago.
By 1893 the conditions for a perfect fair had formed. Steam safely delivered hordes from across the seas and steam brought them to Chicago in long lines of Pullman cars pulled by a mighty eight wheeler. The conditions were perfect and Chicago had the men of vision to realize the perfect fair- and how! And there were men to commemorate it as it deserved. H.H. Bancroft published a large size five volume set displaying its wonders in detail
The setting on Lake Michigan was spectacular; a one of a kind creation, never since replicated or even close to it. The Century Of Progress of 1933 was but a pale imitation. If you’ve read The Devil In The White City you know a fuller description than I’m going to give here. The White City, as the fair grounds were called, was a fairy land, life as it could be. It contrasted with the Black City, life as it was, of everyday Chicago. Industrialism was a recent phenomenon in the nineteenth century so that in the giddiness of creation such things as environmental concerns and labor relations had been neglected or at least not seen in their true importance. Everyday Chicago was a grim place; Eddie often makes unflattering remarks about his home town throughout his novels. It was smelly, smoky and dirty with huge slums not to mention institutionalized crime. They’ve shut down the stockyards but the criminal mentality remains.
The White City in contrast was a city as it could be and should. L. Frank Baum would later use it as the model for his Emerald City. As there was great labor unrest in Chicago at the time the labor force was critical. Those who signed on were quarantined to the site while work was in progress so as not to be corrupted by the labor dissidents. They threw up some of the most massive buildings in existence, practically overnight. They created pleasure gardens and a whole pleasure island. They had the midway of midways, in fact the term Midway was originated at the Expo. In competition with Paris’s Eiffel Tower the worlds’ first monster Ferris Wheel was brought into existence. While in the US the Wheel was turned into a carnival ride now many European capitols display huge four hundred foot Ferris Wheels next to their Houses of Parliament. No US city does; even the original Ferris Wheel was dismantled and has disappeared into some junkyard, perhaps having been converted into the steel beams of a skyscraper.
The Expo not only featured the technological and scientific triumphs of that fabulous nineteenth century but all the intellectual advances; Francis Galton the English psychologist displayed his achievements; Frederick Jackson Turner announced his seminal work on the disappearance of the frontier; The Congress of World Religions set up its tent over in the Black City to discuss how religion was to meet the challenge of science.
One of the first of the body builders, The Great Sandow, performed his strength stunts and flexed his muscles giving Eddie the germ for his seminal literary creation a few years hence.
Imitation Zuni Cliff Dwellings were created, a whole Dahomian village was thrown up, staffed with real Dahomians brought over for the fair. Eddie was influenced by these but he really enjoyed the peep show- forty beautiful women, count ‘em, forty, on display for your delectation.
Dozens of huge buildings from nearly every State and country, art works created an instant museum to rival the great museums of the world. Just outside the gates, too late to be included within, the fabulous Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. History portrayed while it was still in making out on the Western Plains. As incredible as it may seem among the performers was no less than Sitting Bull himself, the engineer of Custer’s defeat at his Last Stand. Amazing. It’s all show biz, folks.
The White City shot up out of the beach sands and chiggers, existed for a few months and then it was gone, burned to the grounds by the labor malcontents of the Black City. Fire is the devil’s best friend. Before it was gone Eddie and his fellows from the Michigan Military Academy marched into that Sacred City like so many Greeks at Troy, in pomp and circumstance. The troops of the MMA strutted in while the band played on. It filled Eddie’s heart with pride. Five years later, slightly inebriated, he and a friend would hire a band parading along behind it through the street of downtown Denver. Let’s just say the fair entrance was one of those thrills.
The summer of ‘93 was one for Eddie to remember. In a few years automobiles would begin to fill the streets of the Black City. In the White City of ‘93 Eddie beat them to the punch driving fair patrons around in his dad’s electric Morrison. The Morrison wasn’t much in the way of self propelled vehicles, being little more than a buckboard with benches on it, but, there was no horse in front of it and Ed was behind the wheel.
There was so much at the fair that a casual weekend visit was merely the smallest of sips, a week was a swallow, two weeks perhaps a draught. Nobody could take it in, nobody, but Ed that is. He had the full three months of that glorious summer to walk the walks, cross the bridges, stroll the romantic Wooded Island to the fabulous Japanese pavilion, gape and take it all in. You’ve got to remember that in those days before movies, TV, videos and color photography bound in convenient volumes no one, or at least very few, had ever seen such things. The fair was the prototype for all the Disney Lands and Worlds now dotting the planet.
What Ed might have missed he may have spotted in a newspaper account, rushing back to the grounds to take it in. Not everyone would know how to use what he saw and experienced, Ed did. Even if it was impossible for him to understand what he saw at the time, Eddie tucked it into the back of his mind from which it emerged in dribbles into his fiction over the thirty years of his writing career.
How lucky he was to pass the Summer of ‘93 in this wonderland. Truly a life changing experience. Not the only one coming up, Eddie had a lot more awaiting him in what he described as a boring life.
3.
Life Begins To Get Serious
First up was graduation from the MMA and the year he spent as a Geology instructor there. Then at the end of the year a depression seized Ed, probably caused by his failure to get an appointment to West Point. He joined the Army anyway leaving the MMA in the lurch while asking for the worst post in the Army’s jurisdiction. He got it. He was very lucky the Army wasn’t the French Foreign Legion or they might have assigned him to a post that made hell look a luxury resort, with no way out. The Army was more considerate, they sent him to Fort Grant in Arizona which was a few degrees cooler than hell although the accommodations were not much better.
The bad news was that Ed was in the Army finding this particular life changing experience, decidedly unpleasant; the good news was that Eddie really liked the desert and the Apaches. Zane Grey beat him to the punch writing about it but Eddie read Zane’s books assiduously. Both Arizona and Southern Utah, the border was disputed at that time, formed an irresistible attraction to him and he and Emma in their later years of marriage returned to it often. Even as Eddie was sadly contemplating divorcing this woman who had stuck with him through thick and thin, he retreated to the White Mountains Apache Reservation to ponder his situation. A deep respect for the Apaches was another consequence of his abbreviated tour of duty. Abbreviated because Ed developed what the Old Timers called a ‘tobacco heart’ and Ed had his dad use his influence to get him out. When the going got tough Eddie always took off running. He remembered that street corner in Chicago.
Well there he was, nearly twenty-five years old with no directions home although he did find his way back to Chicago, a story in itself, which I’m not going to tell here, but fragments of it can be found in The Return Of The Mucker. Ed knew how to use every scrap of his experience to advantage. For a couple years Ed hopped back and forth between Chicago and Idaho where his brothers were still running the ranch where Eddie earned those gigantic spurs.
It was on one of these trips he and an old Army buddy, a member of the Might Have Seen Better Days Club of that brief Army period, hired the band in Denver. It was also in Denver that Ed showed his gambling proclivities losing the money to cover the stretch from Denver to Idaho. As the baby brother, Big Brother Harry covered his act but Ed had set a dangerous precedent.
Part of the reason for Ed’s motation at this particular stage of his life was the maturing of his relationship with future wife Emma. As girls often do, she matured faster than Eddie and hearing her biological clock ticking was ready for the altar. Time was no longer on her side. Whether she could have ever rustled Ed out of bachelorhood is a topic for some rumination if she wasn’t at the same time being courted also by a rich handsome young fellow by the name of Frank Martin. Irish; always a red flag for Eddie who had some Irish blood of his own but considered himself a full blooded English type.
Rich and Irish. Franks’ dad was a big railroad magnate. Had his own private car to hitch at the back of the train. Well, to make a long story short Frank correctly discerned Ed’s intentions of wanting to remain a bachelor yet keep Emma on his string. Ed would go away but he wouldn’t stay away. Frank sat down and thought for a while, perhaps between breakfast and lunch, and thought he had devised a way to keep Eddie away…permanently.
It was a good plan and should have worked but it didn’t. Frank had his dad hook up the private car to a New York City bound train and then invited Ed along for the ride. Our Blithe Spirit got on the train without a qualm. One should never trust the other guy in matters concerning love or money. There are some guys who take the old saying everything’s fair in love and war quite seriously. Ed was to be given the coup de grace in Toronto on the way back. The boys went to the Toronto equivalent of Chicago’s Levee for a night’s entertainment. A couple thugs approached Ed flashing a black jack of sufficient weight and criminal dexterity to kill him but the coup and the grace separated. Ed was down and bloody but he survived. He promptly went back to Chicago and married Emma to keep her out of Frank’s hands. Now it was Frankie’s turn to cry.
We know he was a sore loser and if he didn’t stalk Ed he didn’t let him out of his sight either. Thirty-four years later when Ed and Emma parted Frank’s man Patchin was sent to LA to gloat over the divorce. Even when Eddie died, Frank had preceded him, Patchin sent a mocking letter to Ed’s son.
What I’m leading up to here is not even conjecture but just a bit of imagination, but since I know more than I’m telling, a possibility. As I pointed out for the last twenty years Ed had been dodging the plague; in 1901 he turned a corner and there he was face to face Mr. Typhoid Fever. Fever shook his hand and that was it. Eddie was down and almost out. It was a terrible bout but Ed did survive or else I might be writing about Zane Grey, a decidedly stuffy creature in whom I have no interest.
It was only a little over a year since Frank had been aced out of Emma. Definitely not long enough to cool off his hot Irish temper. A man who will attempt murder once will hold a long grudge and we know that Martin never stopped thinking of Emma and Ed. It may sound far fetched and may be it is, but as Ed caught the Typhus a year or so after snagging Emma I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Frank Martin passed a stolen bacillus on to Ed in some way. Certainly he couldn’t have him assaulted again, an accident might have been difficult, so perhaps he introduced the disease into Ed’s food in some way. Just a suspicion.
Eddie didn’t bounce back to his feet but while he convalescing a very important book to him was issued which he devoured as it appealed to his romantic soul. He would read Owen Wister’s Virginian six or seven times by 1920. If one looks at in this way Ed made several attempts to escape Chicago until he finally succeeded in 1919. If one looks at it like that, as I say, Ed fled with Emma in 1903, 1913, 1916 and 1919.
I always look for a chain of events, the reason why. Wister’s The Virginian has a terrific reputation although it is one of those classics that leaves me cold. Wister was one of Teddy Roosevelt’s buddies. The book he wrote smells like a Gent roughing it in the wilds. Perhaps the appeal to Ed. On the one hand the novel deals with the Johnson County Range War in Wyoming of which Eddie was peripherally associated when he was an Idaho cowboy in ‘91. Several of the rebels who had killed men fled Wyoming while one or two went into hiding in Idaho. Ed apparently knew one of these desperadoes so The Virginian would have had a personal interest for him.
The love story of the book concerns a rough hewn poorly educated cowboy and a school teacher much above him who he woos and wins. They then wed while for their cowboy honeymoon the hero takes his new wife out into the picturesque mountains of Wyoming.
IV.
Buttons And Bows.
A Western ranch is just a branch
Of Nowhere Junction to me.
Give me that city
Where the living’s pretty
And the girls wear finery.
Ray Evans, Buttons and Bows
From Paleface of 1948 starring Bob Hope.
I haven’t read a study on Ed that gave any attention to understanding Emma or her history and yet she was a key figure in his success while after Ed divorced her his production declined in both quantity and quality. It would seem then that whatever drove him as a writer was connected to Emma
There were striking differences between Ed and Emma. Whereas Ed was shifted not only from school to school but from Illinois to Idaho to Massachusetts and finally to Michigan, Emma continued on at Brown School to graduation giving her a much more stable outlook on life. After graduation she studied voice in Chicago becoming familiar with the higher culture while Ed was much more familiar with the lower reaches of culture. Emma would often chide Ed for his lack of culture as he preferred boxing to opera and in later life would become a devotee of professional wrestling with all its vulgar connotations.
The Hulberts, Emma’s family, considered themselves as high class people and, indeed they were. Thus when Frank Martin came calling Emma’s father, Alvin was overjoyed finding Frank a perfect match for his daughter. Alvin quite frankly despised Eddie considering him a ne’er do well and young failure. There was certainly enough evidence to support his point of view. Before the marriage, in order to encourage Frank’s attentions to his daughter, Ed was forbidden the house. And yet Emma had her heart set on Ed and would have him. Apparently her affection never wavered although her opinion of her husband varied. As it would turn out Alvin’s view of the marriage was much more correct than Emma’s. She should have listened to her papa.
As a young girl and woman the Hulberts treated Emma to the best of everything. While her heart was set on Ed, it is obvious that she dated during all those years when Ed was not in Chicago. It is important to remember that Ed was from Chicago but his youth was spent elsewhere so that he was only faintly culturally of Chicago.
Emma was a clotheshorse. As the pictures show she was used to finery. Those are not only a lot of clothes she’s wearing but fairly expensive clothes. Clothes that Ed definitely could not provide her during the first decade or so of their marriage. When he did come into his money it was his pride that Emma could buy any clothes she wanted and he was happy to have her do so.
So, Ed, his head spinning from the Toronto bashing, and woozy from his fever attack, never particularly stable anyway, conceived the notion of taking Emma to the foothills of Idaho to reenact Wister’s novel. In 1903 then, Ed packed Emma and all their belongings to catch a train to Idaho riding baggage with Emma and their dog.
We have no record as yet of what Emma may have thought of this or whether she protested vehemently being overruled by Ed’s unreasoning passion. Of course between bashing, fever and excruciating headaches anyone might be excused erratic but innocent behavior.
Perhaps she objected using an analogous argument to Ray Evans’
My bones denounce the buckboard bounce
And the cactus hurts my toes
Let’s stay here where gals keep usin’
Those silks and satins and linen that shows
And I’m all yours in buttons and bows.
If she did use such an argument she was still in the baggage car with Ed and the dog.
I’m sure the trip was wildly romantic to Ed. His dad’s battery factory was on Madison, the hobo main stem so that I’m sure Ed had discussed the hobo life with them. His 1915 novel The Return Of The Mucker would celebrate the hobo life style as well as its successor The Oakdale Affair. So there they were, he, Emma and the dog in the baggage car like three hoboes.
Look at the picture of Emma in her finery standing in the boxcar. The look on her face echoes the lyric:
Don’t bury me in this prairie
Take me where the cement grows
Let’s go back to where I’ll keep on wearin’
Those frills and flowers and buttons and bows
Rings and things and buttons and bows.
I wonder if that was what was going through her mind.
Those long skirts didn’t work well out in the brambles, Emma didn’t have any other clothes, probably wouldn’t have worn pants if available, nor was Emma entranced with the one room balloon shack Ed threw up so their stay way out there was romantic to only one of them and of short duration.
Now comes an event painful to relate. Emma in her finery is way out there feeling miserable while Ed having removed wife and possessions to the romantic wilderness has only forty dollars in his pocket with no way to earn more. He was a rambler, he was a gambler.
Ed’s brother Harry was off in Parma so he and Emma went down to the station to catch a train to visit Harry. They had to put up for the night in what passed for a hotel room above the saloon. To this point in her life Emma had never even thought of roughing it and now she was learning all about it. To compound matters Eddie kissed her goodbye just like in Frankie and Johnny and went downstairs to find a poker game. His head must really have been hurting. They could have written the song Stagger Lee about him.
Well, he started with forty dollars thinking to inflate his stake to sixty or maybe eighty dollars but fate decreed that he come away with empty pockets. The possible reward wasn’t worth the risk. He had to have been playing with sharpies who took his cash and commiserated with his hard luck.
Let me illustrate how slick it can be. I was nineteen on the California Zephyr and two would be sharpers were trying entice me into a game of poker. They were really obvious and I wasn’t biting, I’d already dealt with sharpers aboard ship and come away cleaned. But, the railroad had an employee on board who must have been an amateur magician, he knew his cards. Dressed like a hick, walking and talking like one, he bustled up with his own deck of cards, invited me to stay, probably would have given me the best hands I’d ever seen because he meant me well, but I wasn’t really interested. Anyway he cleaned those two guys out in ten minutes and bustled off the way he came. They sat there stunned.
Now, I wasn’t present at the game Ed was in but I’d be totally amazed if those boys didn’t have a good laugh and dinner at Ed’s expense. Bad luck, good luck, Ed now stood at the bottom of the stairs swallowing hard, trying to figure out just how he was going to explain their dilemma to Emma. To be short about it, this was another one of those life changing experiences for Ed. No, sir, Ed didn’t have an explanation that Emma would accept. I mean, she could have married a millionaire and here she was in a wretched so-called hotel room a thousand miles from nowhere without a dime. Think about it. What was going through her mind?
Their relationship changed right there. It was a change that Ed would never be able to overcome; I’m sure it was the primary cause for the divorce thirty years later as Emma could never forget while Ed could never get over his shame. But, Ed hung in there for now. He recorded much of this period in his novel The Girl From Ferriss’s While a romanticized view of the years between 1900 and 1922 can be found in Marcia Of The Doorstep when Ed was again in hot water for overextending himself financially in LA.
I’m sure the railroads had a bitter taste for Ed after Frank Martin and Toronto. The memory of that private car shone in Ed’s mind like a diamond, but for now he took a job on the Oregon Shortline as a yard policeman in Salt Lake City. That is until Emma rebelled at taking in boarders ordering Ed to take her back to Chicago:
Let’s move back to that big town
Where they love a gal by the cut o’ her clothes
And I’ll stand out in buttons and bows.
Ed had a garage sale or whatever they called them back then actually selling Emma’s ornately carved marriage bed for a pittance. I’m sure that left a little scar too. Then, perhaps because Emma ragged him about riding baggage he bought a couple first class tickets back to the Black City which now appeared blacker than ever, I’m sure.
Ed was now a lost boy with responsibilities. The next seven years must have been a period of the blackest despair for him. He just couldn’t get his act together. He wandered from job to job. He landed a job at Sears, Roebuck that was a good job paying three thousand dollars a year. Not bad money in those days when unskilled labor worked six twelve hour days for from five hundred to seven-fifty a year. Ed’s prospects were good. He probably could have moved up into the five to ten thousand class in a few years. He showed up at his front door saying: Honey, I quit. Emma’s reaction wasn’t recorded but I’m sure it was voluble.
And then, of course, there were the pencil sharpeners. Ed never did sell one but he did sit down and write half of A Princess Of Mars. Who would have believed it? Munsey’s Magazine to who he had submitted it asked for the other half and gave him four hundred dollars to boot. Whether Ed and Emma sensed it or not they were on their way aboard the rocket, ready to ride.
We all hope for the success of our wildest dreams but few if any of us are prepared to manage the consequences of that success. It’s not as easy as it might seem. It’s sort of like the town bum spending a dollar for a lottery ticket and getting fifty million in return. If the bum thought he knew money before he is now introduced to the real thing.
For Ed who in his conception was born a prince, made a pauper, spending decades in disappointed expectations, now realized his destiny again. Upbraided by Emma for being a poor provider he was now in a position to provide her every desire, after taking care of his first, of course. The past weighed heavy on Eddie. The difficulties of his courtship and the shame of that gambling night in Idaho had to be rectified, reversed.
It couldn’t be, of course. One’s failures can only be recognized, accepted and lived with. But in a frenzy Ed thought that by repeating the private car incident and the disastrous trip to Idaho he could wash away the stains. Thus, having established a market for his goods, most especially with the creation of his ‘meal ticket’ Tarzan, Ed did an incredible thing. Remember he still had no money in the bank, betting entirely on the come.
As with Idaho he packed up all his goods including his useless second hand car, wife and by now three kids, bought five first class tickets to San Diego and made another attempt at fleeing Chicago. First class wasn’t the same as a private car but it was pretty close so Ed hopefully erased the shame of Frank Martin’s trip to New York City and back.
Once in San Diego, which stay lasted nine months, or long enough to be born again as the New Ed, he must have lived a princely existence going through most of the ten thousand he earned that year while returning to Chicago as broke as he had been when he and Emma boarded the train in Salt Lake City. So, he tried to eliminate his shame.
Once back in the Black City, having sold his production while in San Diego, he wrote some more, sold some more and made a seamless transition from the old Ed to the reincarnated Ed.
I would imagine that part of the plan was to get Tarzan published as a book and with that money establish himself as a man of means in his old home town. Move on up to the Gold Coast.
That would seem to be a very reasonable plan from our point of view but it was not that easy. Perhaps Tarzan, which is pure fantasy of the extravagant kind went well beyond publisher’ literary expectations. No one would touch it then, even though from our perspective the story was pure gold as, indeed, it turned out to be although not for Ed. Perhaps the novel appeared to the literary taste of Ed’s day as comic books did to literary lights in the forties and fifties of the last century, something to be burned and banned, hence Ed’s success was of the bastard sort.
He finally did get his novel published in book form in 1914 but he was stripped of most of the financial benefits as it went almost directly to reprint publishers; thus his royalties were more than halved and mere pittances of what they might have been. Still, by the time royalties began to come in Ed had created a backlog of Tarzan novels so that with current production one a year would be published for about ten years.
As the profit motive didn’t seem to be activating his publisher, the Chicago firm of McClurg’s, Ed was reduced to pleading with them to print at least twenty to thirty thousand copies before a novel was sent to the reprint house. It seems incomprehensible that McClurg’s wouldn’t do so on their own but they obstinately refused to make money for themselves and hence for Ed.
Well, the records, as I’ve been told, have been destroyed so what’s to be said. Once again I suspect outside interference. McClurg’s was an Irish house; Frank Martin was Irish. McClurg’s a was semi-public company open to investors one assumes; Frank Martin had money to invest. Until a better explanation is provided I have to believe something along those lines was happening.
But, if Eddie could have lived long enough the wonders he would have seen. At one hundred he would have been a very rich man. Those successful intellectual properties just keep gaining in value. Better than stamp collecting.
While Ed appears to have been stymied at the publishing end, that enterprise was old hat, the new wonder of the authorial imagination was movies. The Big Money, to quote John Dos Passos, Thus to some extent the movies made up for what Ed was being cheated out of in publishing. The first film production of Tarzan was the industries first million grosser. Thus when Ed successfully fled Chicago in 1919 his income was ten times what it had been in 1913. If his work was disparaged, as the say goes, he laughed all the way to the bank. Ed left Chicago with his pockets jingling.
Next: Part II: If Pigs Had Wings
2011 in review
December 31, 2011
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 160,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 7 days for that many people to see it.
I, Dynamo 