Conversations With Robin Page 3
August 20, 2009
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Conversations With Robin, Page 3
Conversations between R.E. Prindle And Robin Mark
Well, well, well. Robert Goulet. I should have known that filthy bastard would be mixed up in there somewhere. What amazes me is that Guralnik could write two fat volumes on Elvis and never mention the Mob once. I think we can begin to integrate Elvis’ Mob conflicts pretty clearly now, although research will have to establish the connections for sure.
For starters, entertainment is a Mob industry both records and movies; that includes both Jews and Sicilians. If you haven’t read Gus Russo’s Supermob yet, do so. The Sidney Korshak role at MCA is crucial.
Anent shooting out TVs remember that Sinatra had a plane he called Superwop or something to that effect so it is clear he bore a grudge against the Anglo world. The plane was a small ‘Lear’ if I remember correctly. Elvis went out and bought a 707. Big plane, big penis; little plane little penis. Not exactly true in Frank’s case, but you get the point. So at least Goulet and Sinatra. I can understand why Dean Martin tried to distance himself from those creeps.
Parker must have had the business dealings with the Outfit. As he ran into gambling problems the only commodity he had to barter was Presley. Thus he would have had to ‘sell’ Presley to keep both his legs under him. Elvis’ rapid deterioration could have been because of his realization that he was ‘caught in a trap. I can’t get out.’ Devastating awareness. One could only retreat into booze and/or drugs.
Now, Leiber said that he and Stoller at one time worked for the Mafia. This wouldn’t be unusual nor should it be held against them because if you’re in entertainment you’re involved, like it or not. The question is when were they involved, for how long, and for what purpose.
We all know Fabian was a Mob creation. Why not others? If you haven’t seen and studied The Girl Can’t Help It, do so. The movie is an alegory of the record business. Everything you see in the movie is the Outfit in action. In the fifties every Juke Box in America was stocked by the Outfit. You didn’t get your record stocked unless you were Mobbed up somewhere along the line. Someone recently told me that the girls on the Dick Clark Show were prostitutes and Bandstand was used to showcase them for Johns. Don’t know that it’s true but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Leiber and Stoller could have been co-opted to write songs for, say, The Coasters. A Black act with interchangeable personnel. Kind of an early Back Street Boys. I don’t know but I’d like to hear Leiber talk about it. Might prove enlightening.
So, let us assume that the Colonel was drawn into the Mob scene from the beginning of Presley’s movie career. That might explain some of his stupid decisions and those dumb movies. Perhaps Parker didn’t have a free hand but was ‘wise’ enough to figure out that something is better than nothing.
Then after Vegas Presley was increasingly drawn into orbit until he learned the horrifying truth. Guralnik seems to have his head up his ass as far as I’m concerned.
As Presley learned the truth looking forward to forty more years of slavery he found drugs more comfortable than reality. Possible, it would make things make sense.
A Review: Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs
August 19, 2009
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#5: Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 1:
On The Road To Opar
I have put off reviewing this Tarzan several times. I like it but I find it difficult. This may have been the first Tarzan book I read, probably in 1950. While I have always liked Tarzan And The Ant Men and Tarzan The Terrible Opar was always my favorite.
Of course in 1950 one’s choice was limited to eight or ten, not including the first, so I read the later novels only recently. Tarzan And The Lion Man is my current favorite. Opar was written in 1915 about a year after the commencement of The Great War, the occupation of Haiti and war scares with Mexico. This was also after ERB’s first spurt that ran from 1911-1914. The latter year emptied the pent up reservoir containing the residue of his early reading and experiences. That period may be described as ERB’s ‘amateur period.’ The latter part of 1914 began what may be described as his professional life as a writer. The spontaneous automatic period was over; he had to think out his stories. That meant he had to do some new reading. Opar coincided with his completion of reading Gibbon’s Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. What effect that may have had on Opar I’m not sure.
At the foundation of ERB’s approach to his stories are the three titles of Twain’s Prince And The Pauper, Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Wister’s The Virginian. After 1914 he would refer to Jack London and write a series based on the style of Booth Tarkington. While he continued to produce during the twenties, the period was also one of intense reading that produced the magnificent stories of the early thirties. That need not concern us here.
While his favorite three books were the rock on which he built his church, the Oz stories of Baum contribute to the superstructure as they do so prominently in Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar. The second chapter is even titled: On The Road To Opar. ERB only left out the yellow brick and changed the Emerald City to Opar. It is clearly indicated that Opar is based on the Emerald City.
Rather than being emerald Opar is red and gold. La, the high priestess of Opar can be considered a combination of Baum’s Ozma and Rider Haggard’s She.
The Baum connection is strengthened by the fact that, as I believe but can only conjecture at this point, Burroughs visited Baum at his Hollywood home during ERB’s residence in Southern California in 1913. One guesses but it is probable that ERB got some pointers from Baum on how to keep the Tarzan series going as Baum was producing volume after volume of Oz stories. In point of fact Baum had run out of ideas in 1910 attempting to close off the series. He was compelled to restart the series in 1913 at the insistence of his fans.
Burroughs had effectively closed the Tarzan series with The Son Of Tarzan. Son is a favorite of a lot of people but for me it’s pretty much a rehash of the first three stories; I call the four The Russian Quartet after the villains of the series. Tarzan was already old in Beasts Of Tarzan but by Son he had to come out of retirement. There was no future then, so the Big Bwana had to be reborn. The old Tarzan ended with Son; the new Tarzan began with Jewels Of Opar. A fine new beginning it was.
The Ballantine edition of 1963 prefaces the story with a quote titled: ‘In Quest Of A Lost Identity’, that might easily be changed to ‘A Search For A New Identity’, for in fact, Burroughs old identity had been lost when he gained success and riches. ERB wanted to go forward not back:
Tarzan staggered to his feet and groped his way about among the underground ways of Opar. What was he? Where was he? His head ached, but otherwise he felt no ill effects from the blow that had felled him. He did not recall the accident, nor aught of what had led up to it.
At last he found the doorway leading inward beneath the city and temple. Nothing spurred his hurt memory to a recollection of past familiarity with his surroundings. He blundered on through the darkness as though he were traversing an open plain under a noonday sun.
Suddenly he reached the brink of a well, stepped outward into space, lunged forward, and shot downward into the inky depths below. Still clutching his spear, he struck the water and sank beneath its surface…
Tarzan loses his memory at great stress points in Burroughs’ life. They take place at Opar in underground caverns surr9unded by a wealth of gold. One might think then that they are related to Burroughs’ financial success and through La to his sex life.
One must bear in mind that ERB came into the beginnings of his success just as he was edging into the mid-life crisis. Given a reasonable amount of money in 1913 he reacted in a nouveau riche manner. Remembering back to 1899 and his private railcar trip to NYC and back he tried to relive it with Emma. His trip with Frank Martin troubled his memory. He recalled it 1914 when he took the job on the railroad in Salt Lake City. In 1913 he packed the family aboard with all his belongings and rode out to Los Angeles and San Diego. He may very well have rented a whole Pullman car for himself and family that would be equivalent to a private car but we don’t know for sure at this time. We only know that he was fixated on a private car and that he rode first class.
We can be sure that he was realizing all his dreams as fast as he could earn the money to pay for them or perhaps before he had the money.
He was moving through uncharted territory thus ‘he blundered on through the darkness as though he were traversing an open plain under a noonday sun.’
ERB has his eyes wide open but the unfamiliar demands being placed on him were equivalent to darkness: he couldn’t be sure whether he was making the right decisions. ‘What was he? Where was he.’ This is a dilemma of the newly successful. And then by late 1914, early 1915 he realized that he was in over his head.
Suddenly he reached the brink of a well, stepped outward into space, lunged forward, and shot downward into the inky depths below. Still clutching his spear, he struck the water and sank beneath the surface…
What? Of course. McClurg’s released the first Tarzan as a book in 1914 treating the release in what seems a peculiar way. The contract had been signed, apparently perpetual and unbreakable, ERB, Inc. only bought it out in the fifties, so he must have realized that he had been had. He committed the same error in 1931 when he signed his contract with MGM so he didn’t learn much over the years.
His contract would certainly have been a contributing factor but there may have been other sources that put him in over his head. It is significant that Tarzan didn’t drop his spear; he was still capable fo defending himself.
Now, one would have to believe that Burroughs was at least famous in Chicago. By 1917-18 Tarzan was a household word recognized it seems by everyone. It would be odd indeed if sexual temptations weren’t placed before him. Literary groupies surrounded authors then as groupies did musicians in the ’60s.
La herself is a repressed sexual image while the novel abounds in sexual images. Perhaps signficantly when the rutting elephants charge the priests of Opar Tarzan takes refuge in a tree high above the ruckus. Even then the rutting elephants try to uproot his tree to bring the Big Bwana to earth but do not succeed. One may infer that while temptation was strong ERB remained faithful to Emma.
However by 1918’s Tarzan The Untamed, note the title, Jane is killed while Tarzan’s eye immediately wanders forming a near dalliance with another woman. It was also at this period that ERB walked out on Emma. As told in Tarzan The Terrible, note the title, and Tarzan And The Golden Lion Tarzan and Emma were separated through those two novels and Tarzan The Untamed.
So, Jewels of Opar may be describing the dark side of success when the master tempter attacks you at your most vulnerable plus Burroughs was in full blown mid-life crisis by 1914-15.
The forces of change were shaking him like a terrier shaking a rat. His situation was terrible and wonderful at the same time. So, with Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar he launched himself on his career as a professional writer.
Part 2.
The novels of Burroughs previous to Opar had flowed from his experience and early reading. The reading had provided the framework that ERB fleshed out with his interests, ideas and experience in essentially an allegorical form. David Adams quite justly points out that Burroughs relies quite heavily on a fairy tale format although it took me a long time to recognize it. ERB’s wonderlands are lands of enchantment as much as that of Mallory’s and Pyles Arthurian England. That is certainly clear in this book.
Now Burroughs has to actually invent and construct a story from scratch. Once again he relies on his reading. The first chapter titled The Belgian And The Arab encapsulates his reading and perhaps watercooler discussions of the Belgian administration of the Congo with the depredations of the Arab slaver Tippu Tib as gleaned from Stanley’s two tremendous adventures, Through The Dark Continent and In Darkest Africa.
In the first Stanley encountered Tib on the upper Congo, Lualaba he calls it, when Tib was just beginning to extract the Congo tribes for slaves. A few years later Stanley encountered Tib on his way across the Congo from the West to East. By that time Tib was halfway across the Congo basin toward the West depopulating it on his way. In this story Achmet Zek is based on Tippu Tib while Albert Werper, the Belgian, meets him well into the Congo moving up river as in Stanley’s In Darkest Africa.
Werper, as a Belgian, epitomizes King Leopold of Belgium’s administration of the Congo. For a few decades the entire Congo Free State as it was then known was his personal possession Tippu Tib or no. As such he had to make it pay and make it pay he did. Rubber was the engine of that prosperity. As the tree was not yet cultivated as Firestone would in Malaya, the Africans were required to collect balls of rubber from the wild. Not naturally inclined to collect rubber some harsh disciplinary measures were required to give them incentive. One method if they failed to bring in their quota was to cut off their right hand. Seemingly counter-productive it was nevertheless effective although there were a lot of Africans walking around with only a left hand. In Leopold’s defense the method was suggested by Africans themselves.
Leopold made money but incurred the hatred of Africans while giving himself an atrocious reputation in Europe and America. The Belgians removed the Free State from his administration after which it became known as the Belgian Congo. Thus Burroughs unites two men of evil reputation in the Belgian Albert Werper and the Arab Achmet Zek. They naturally conspire evil.
ERB also leans on Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness for his opening episode. Heart Of Darkness was Conrad’s most famous work and it may be said his reputation has been founded on it. A sensation when published it is or was still widely read today.
The opening scene takes place at the Stanley Pool where the Congo begins its descent from the plateau. Perhaps the post was the nascent Stanleyville. Werper commits his crime then flees into the jungle where he is captured by the Arab Achmet Zek/Tippu Tib.
The Belgian and the Arab are two of a kind forming a natural partnership with Zek being the senior partner. Zek may have been able to carry on his depredations without hindrance except for the Great White Lord of the jungle, Tarzan. Thus Burroughs rectifies the situation in his imagination. Prior to Werper Zek had no way to reach the Big Bwana but with the European Werper he has an entree.
Jane, of course, will be captured to be taken to the North to Algiers or Tunis to be sold into a Moslem harem. That would have been a nifty trick from the Congo to the Mediterranean. The walk alone might have taken a year or more.
So, as the chapter ends the plan is to kill Tarzan giving Zek a free hand and capture Jane.
Part 3.
Chapter two ‘On The Road To Opar’ introduces what will be a recurrent theme in Tarzan’s life- insolvency. In this case the Big Fella has made a bad investment, not unlike Burroughs’ habit, and been wiped out. Being now impoverished he has to recruit a new fortune by taking several hundred pounds of gold from the vaults of Opar.
Tarzan justifies himself:
…the chances are that they inhabitants of Opar will never know that I have been there again and despoiled them of another portion of the treasure, the very existence of which they are as ignorant of as they would be of its value.
Thus, the Zen question, are you stealing from someone if you take what they don’t know they have or its value somewhere else? I would be interested in ERBs justification of what seems to be a felony. After all Tarzan isn’t going to show up with a brassband and waving banners; he’s going to sneak in and out hopefully unnoticed. It’s too late to ask now.
The raid on Opar may have reflected ERB’s financial condition after 1913-14’s stay in San Diego. He had to write another Tarzan novel to recoup his finances.
As Tarzan is about to leave, Zek and Werper have concocted their plan. Werper is to gain admittance to the household under guise of being a lost great white hunter and prepare the way for Zek. Werper posing as the Frenchman Frecoult overhears Tarzan and Jane discussing Opar quickly realizing there is more at stake here than killing Tarzan and selling a White woman into a Sheik’s harem in the North.
He warns Zek while following Tarzan on the road to Opar.
Chapter 3 is titled The Call Of The Jungle. As On The Road To Opar reflects Baum’s Oz stories so the Call Of The Jungle resonates rather well with Jack London’s Call Of The Wild. the jungle that Tarzan inhabits is a wonderful place, no bugs, no mosquitoes. In Africa the land of fevers that would still be unknown if Europeans had not invaded the continent Tarzan never has one. We know that ERB read Stanley. That explorer speaks of no romance of the jungle. For him it was a dark dank horrible place he couldn’t get out of fast enough. He not only suffered terrible fevers but so did everyone else. Yet in Burroughs’ imagination the jungle becomes a paradise.
Perhaps that might reflect thte lost paradise of America conquered by industrialism and cities. Perhaps in its way it represents the White City of the Columbian Exposition as opposed to the Black City of industrial Chicago. Idaho vs. Chicago; something of that order.
Now hungry Tarzan kills a deer with his favored bare hands method plunging Dad’s knife deep into its heart. Dad’s knife and plunging it into the heart of its victim. There’s an image. ERB had a terrible relationship with his father. Perhaps he visualized the relationship as his father killing him with heartaches. Haven’t actually worked out the meaning yet. Interrupted by a lion he retreats to a tree with a haunch between his strong white teeth. Another sexual image. Now, here we have another psychological problem. Tarzan is a very unforgiving guy, petty even. Having been disturbed in his dinner which surely must have been a frequent occurrence in the jungle, he is not going to let the lion eat his kill in peace. Up in his convenient tree he finds another tree nearby bearing hard fruit. Not the soft mushy kind but hard. He bombards the lion until it leaves the kill.
The lion slinks off after his own game, a lone African witch doctor. Tarzan doesn’t care if the lion kills the African but just as his dinner was disrupted he wants to punish the lion by depriving him of his. So just as the lion mauls the African Tarzan jumps on the lion’s back and kills him merely for interrupting the Big Guy’s dinner. You know, that’s capital punishment for a very minor offence. This is a little excessive to my mind.
What does it say about ERB’s own state of mind? Was he also unforgiving and draconian in his revenges? ERB himself mostly stood in his relationships as the African to the lion. There is a certain irony in the symbol of MGM being Leo The Lion. In his last major confrontation with MGM, Leo mauled ERB pretty badly. There was no room left for revenge in that struggle.
The mauled witch doctor had appeared in Tarzan Of The Apes. He recognized Tarzan but was unrecognized by the latter.
In his youth he would slain the witch-doctor without the slightest compuncition, but civilization had had its softening effect on him even as it does upon the natives and races which it touches though it had not gone far enough with Tarzan to render him either cowardly or effeminate.
From this we may infer that ERB believed Europeans and Americans to have become effeminate and cowardly. Perhaps so.
The witch doctor reminds him of Mbonga’s village of the old days when they made Tarzan the god Munango-Keewati and now he makes a prophecy:
…I shall reward you. I am a great witch-doctor. Listen to me, white man! I see bad days ahead of you…A god greater than you wil rise up and strike you down. Turn back, Munango-Keewati! Turn back before it is too late. Danger lurks ahead of you and danger lurks behind; but greater is the danger before. I see…
And then characteristically he croaks. Werper was behind and Opar ahead. But what was danger to the Big Bwana; danger was his life. Of course ERB could have been talking about himself as well. Certainly by this time ERB must have realized that success and fame was going to be no bed of roses. He needed more money to continue his new life style. Could he get it now that his first spurt was finished. He had been warned by his editor Metcalf that most pulp writers had success for a couple years but then exhausted their sources. He must have feared that he was already there.
A new period of anxiety loomed before him, probably debt behind. As Tarzan is about to lose his memory, stress may have been addling ERB’s brain. Nevertheless impelled by necessity- onward.
Part II in another post.
Two , Three And Four Dimensional Burroughs
August 2, 2009
Two, Three And Four Dimensional Burroughs
by
R.E. Prindle
George McWhorter, the headmaster of our school, published a couple of very interesting letters in the Burroughs Bulletin, New Series #79, Summer 2009 issue.
In the first letter a Leo Baker from Nova Scotia proposed an idea to ERB. Burroughs gave a very interesting reply:
On March 16, 1920, I started a story along similar lines based on a supposed theory of angles rather than planes. If we viewed our surrundings from our own “angle of experience,” the aspect of the vibrations which are supposed to consitute both matter and thought were practically identical with those pervceived by all the creatures of the world that we know, whereas, should our existence have been cast in another angle, everything would be different, including the flora and fauna and the physical topography of the world.
The thought underlying the story was that wherefrom, viewed thus from a different angle, the vibrations that are matter took on an entirely different semblance, so that where before we had seen oceans, we might now see mountains, plains and rivers inhabited by creatures that might be identical with those which we had hithertoo been familiar, or might vary diametrically.
You see that it was a crazy story….
Now, Burroughs was a child of his times. Part of those times were some very remarkable speculative works by a remarkable thinker, Camille Flammarion. In his work Lumen for instance he demonstrates the non-existence of time. We know that ERB read Flammarion. We know that Burroughs went to lengths to demonstrate the non-existence of time. He may have drawn his own conclusions but as he read Flammarion say, by 1900, the notion at least was deposited in his mind where subconsciously it came to fruition prompted by Einstein no doubt. There were a couple other imaginative scientific writers of the late nineteenth century that my Burroughs studies led to me read. As has been said of old: When the student is ready the teacher will appear. I suppose I was ready and I read. Having read them they resonated quite strongly of ERB’s work but without anything other than ‘resonances’ to go on I didn’t dare suggest the ERB might have read them.
Other than Flammarion the two works I have in mind are Edwin Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance Of Many Dimensions and Charles Howard Hinton’s Scientific Romances. Flatland was published in 1884, Scientific Romances undoubtedly inspired by Flatland appeared in 1886. Flatland is still a famous if recondite book while Hinton is less well known.
Both works deal with lines and angles in a manner that as ERB suggests is ‘crazy.’ One has an unreal feeling in reading the books. Either ERB felt the same of his story or he was so close to Abbott and Hinton that he desisted. One notes, however, that his description of his 1920 story is very close to his Pellucidar stories and it was Pellucidar that was brought to my mind while reading Hinton and Abbott. ERB notices a theory of angles rather than planes combined with ‘vibrations.’ This suggests a continuing interest intitally excited by Abbott and Hinton combined with the originator of the theory of vibrations. The last is unkown to me at present.
While there are many who believe there is no intellectual depth to Burroughs I find a great deal of mounting evidence to suggest he was very interested in the intellectual and scientific ideas of his time and, indeed, built his entire corpus around them.
Both Hinton and Abbott are readily available, as well as Flammarion, if anyone want to join in a discussion.
A Review: Beau Sabreur by P.C. Wren
August 1, 2009
Note: I mistakenly placed the review of Beau Geste on another of my blogs: reprindle.wordpress.com. The review may be found there.
A Contribution To The
Erbzine Library Project
The Beau Ideal Trilogy Of
P.C. Wren
Beau Geste~Beau Sabreur~Beau Ideal
Part III
Review Of Beau Sabreur
by
R.E. Prindle
Part I: Introduction
Part II: A Review Of Beau Geste
Part III: A Review Of Beau Sabreur
Part IV: A Review Of Beau Ideal
Bibliographial Entry: Welland, James: ‘The Merchandise Was Human’, Horizon Magazine, Vol. VII, No. 1, Winter 1965. PP. 111-117
Beau Sabreur shifts from the classic literary style of the mid-nineteenth century to the vernacular of pulp or, perhaps, Wold Newton era. The pulp writers seem to have all read each other and Wren has certainly done his share of reading.
This novel begins at a pre-Zinderneuf time when Charles De Beaujolais was a mere cadet entering the service. If Beau Geste began in c. 1888 Beau Sabreur is set back at the beginning to perhaps 1875. De Beaujolais’ circumstances quite parallel those of the hero of Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness. Conrad has maintained a very respectable readership down to the present even though stoutly anti-Communist and a colonial writer. Both Communists and Africans are working hard to bury his reputation. It’s amazing how guys like Conrad manage to hang on, but that may not be for long as Western influence in society declines.
So it is that De Beaujolais is a sort of lounger applying himself to nothing in particular when his uncle recruits him for the French secret service as an agent to be attached to the African Spahis, an army corps. His uncle says that he will severely try him and should he fail in any particular he will be immediately dismissed. This essentially means that if De Beaujolais lets a woman come between him and his duty it is all over for him. So we are forewarned that there will a choice between love and duty.
The book was written after 1917 so Wren introduces a subversive Communist or anarchist character. In this book he assumes the name of Becque at the beginning. In Beau Geste he went by Rastignac and late in the novel he will be recognized as Rastignac although he appears to be going by another name. Wren has a good idea of the type describing him thusly under the name Becque:
He was clearly a monomaniac whose whole mental content was hate- hate of France; hate of all who had what he had not; hate of control, discipline and government; hate of whatsoever and whomever did not meet his approval. I put him down as one of those sane lunatics, afflicted with a destructive complex; a diseased egoist, and a treacherous, dangerous mad dog. Also a very clever man indeed, an eloquent, plausible and forceful personality…The perfect agent-provacteur, in fact.
Thus Becque in his various incarnations is always subversive, whether of army morale or working the Moslems up against the French. This will be a major theme of the novel. the same theme will appear in Tarzan The Invincible developed for his own needs.
Having been recruited by his uncle, De Beaujolais is sent to a sort of boot camp to learn the hard way. His ordeal is very convincingly described by Wren. It seems authentic enough to make one believe that Wren himself actually experienced such an indoctrination but there is no record that he did. He is just a consummate artist.
While learning to be a soldier Becque attempts to recruit him as a Communist agent. This leads to a sword fight in which De Beajuolais injures Becque but does not kill him.
Having completed his boot camp De Beaujolais takes his station with the secret service and the Spahis in Africa. Spahis are not FFL but a different corps.
When the French conquered Algeria in 1830 they disrupted a thousand year old social system. The North African Moslems had an insatiable need for slaves. Not only did they raid European shores to abduct Whites but an immense system for deliviering Negro slaves had been in existence since the Moslem conquest. This system had been run by the Tuaregs. This people was descended from Whites dating back to at least the Phoenician conquest of North Africa. Their alphabet probably precedes that of the Phoenicians. Undoubtedly they were the descendants of the former inhabitants of Mediterranean Valley known as Libyans in Egypt flushed out by the melting of the ice age.
What they did before the arrival of the Moslems isn’t known but with the African conquest of the Moslems they became the middle men between Africans of the Sahel and the Moslems of the North. Every year for a thousand years the Tuaregs had collected convoys of Negroes from the South driving them North across the Sahara. This was necessarily done with great loss of life as the Tuaregs were not that tender toward the Negroes.
With the advent of the Atlantic Slave Trade in the sixteenth century the Tuaregs also captured Negroes and drove them to St. Louis in Senegal for sale and transshipment to the Americas. According to James Welland the depredations on the Blacks was so great that the area around Lake Tchad had been cleared of inhabitants. This age old life style was disrupted in 1830 by the French. By that time Europeans had discontinued the slave trade so that the French disrupted the trans-Sahara trade causing a disruption in the Tuareg economy from which there was no recovery. Welland explains:
In short, the official abolition of the slave trade, the desert tribes, the desert itself for that matter began to play a diminished part in human affairs, and the Tuareg, who had been the only link for two and a half thousand years between Central Africa and the Mediterranean- in other words, between the Negro and the White world- began to pass from the stage of history. They were left unemployed and purposeless, with the result that they turned to intertribal war and oasis raiding to keep some semblance of their nationhood. Then again, as the supply of black labor dried up, the palmeries were increasingly neglected and often, as the consequence of a razzia, comepletely destroyed. The size and number of oases decreased, sand filled the wells and cisterns- many of which had been maintained since Roman times- and the age old trails became more hazardous and finally were hardly used at all.
In the secret service in Africa De Beaujolais becomes involved in the maelstrom of change, racial conflict and bad memories which were now exacerbated by the arrival of the non-Moslem, or Christian, French. The novel beomes then a sort of proto-thriller. De Beaujolais is on a mission to a town called Zaguig when he is caught up in a Moslem revolt. In Zaguig he meets the touring Mary and Otis Vanbrugh. Otis, you will remember returns from Beau Geste.
Mary is the love interest in the story and she will conflict De Beaujolais between his love for her and his duty as imposed by his uncle. Frankie Laine or Tex Ritter and songwriters Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington (I tried to work Trad. in there somewhere but couldn’t do it) expressed the balance well in the song High Noon:
Oh to be torn ‘betwixt’ love and duty
Supposin’ I lose my fair haired beauty…
De Beaujolais relates the story of another agent who chose his beauty over duty and was drummed out of the service ultimately being killed. De Beaujolais has a premonition. Wren cleverly resolves the choice so that De Beaujolais gets his beauty while fulfilling his duty.
At the same time Otis Vanbrugh meets the apparent Arab dancing girl, who yet retains European features, who will figure largely in the sequel.
As the revolt erupts these conflicts emerge. As is usual in thrillers things are not what they seem. Raoul D’Auray De Redon, a close friend of De Beaujolais’ remains behind disguised as an Arab to confuse their attack on a small French garrison destined to be wiped out. De Beaujolais has important dispatches which must be delivered. Thus duty makes him appear to be an ingrate and coward humiliating him before Mary. His job is to locate the latest Arab Mahdi and suborn him the the French side.
De Beaujolais thinks little of Otis Vanbrugh and we are meant to accept his opinion. His true story will appear in the sequel.
Mary was one of those women who flirt by taunting or ridiculing her guy. In her case when De Beaujolais was within hearing she mockingly whistled a tune De Beaujolais couldn’t quite place but was called Abdullah Bulbul Amir. This was a very popular song and poem of the time that can be found at http://wiki.answers.com/Q/lyrics_of_bhulbhuliya. A couple of verses of its 19 will suffice to give its tenor but the poem is one you should be familiar with.
The sons of the Prophet are hardy and bold,
And quite unaccustomed to fear,
But the most reckless of life or of limb
Was Abdullah Bulbul Amir.
When they wanted a man to encourage the van
Or harass a foe from the rear,
Storm fort or redoubt, they had only to shout
For Abdullah Bulbul Amir.
Apparently the poem was so well known that Wren felt no need to name it and he doesn’t.
The time to leave Zaguig comes, so taking his entourage of faithful soldiers, Mary and her maid Maud, he sets out into the desert toward Oran.
Soon Tuareg or Arab raiders pick his party up and they are forced to fight a pitched battle although from an advantageous position. Here De Beaujolais has to make a very difficult choice between between loyalty to his men and his duty to get his dispatches through. Getting his men into position he is compelled to abandon them to their fate and push on.
This puts a strain on his relationship with Mary who cannot understand the concept of duty or necessity- the necessity to get the dispatches through. After a long flight the party falls into the hands of a desert tribe. But this is a strange desert tribe. Rather than the usual unorganized tactics these fellows seem to have the scientific training of the French. Another mystery.
As luck would have it De Beaujolais and the women were captured by the Mahdi’s troops. By way of explanation the Moslem Mahdi is equivalent to the Jewish Messiah but not the Christian Messiah. There’s only one Christ but Jewish Messiahs and Moslem Mahdis pop up everywhere.
So now, going back to the ending of Beau Geste, the two Americans Hank and Buddy were out there somewhere trodding the burning sands. Hank was discovered and rescued on the point of death by a kind hearted Sheik while Buddy was captured by hard hearted Tuaregs being saved from death when Hank Sheik’s tribe defeated his captors. Buddy was out there somewhere for a long time because Hank had been rescued years before.
Having been rescued at the point of death Hank was aware of the necessity to pass as a Moslem so he pretends to be dumb until he has learned the language so well he can pass. He then cleverly becomes the tribe’s sheik. The tribe is then threatened by a razzia of Tuaregs. As this takes place in the North Tuaregs no longer having Negroes to convoy have taken to raiding the oases. Normally the tribe would have run and hid leaving their goods and a few token members as slaves for the Tuaregs. Hank has a better idea and using his superior scientific French training the tribe rather than waiting to be attacked unexpectedly attack the Tuareg camp handily defeating them. Buddy is thus rescued. Coincidences are dime dozen out on the burning sands.
Teaching Buddy the language while he too plays dumb, Buddy becomes Hank’s vizier. With Buddy as military commander the tribe is trained in scientific methods in earnest. They then begin to organize the tribes into a confederation thus earning Hank the title of Mahdi in French eyes. De Beaujolais was thus on a mission to co-opt the new Mahdi.
As luck, or coincidence, would have, at the same time De Beaujolais and the girls arrive so does Becque/Rastignac. Becque is now employed one supposes by the Soviet Union to arouse the Moslems to a jihad. He comes bearing gifts not realizing that Hank and Buddy are his old Legion comrades. He doesn’t recognize them but Hank recognizes him. Becque and De Beaujolais have that old unsettled score to settle. De Beaujolais now settles his hash removing that source of irritation.
I’ve pointed out before that Burroughs very likely drew inspiration for his series of political Tarzan novels from 1930 to 1933 after reading this trilogy from 1924 to 1928. The Sahara had fascinated him long before he read Wren. David Innes of Pelucidar even surfaces in the Sahara returning from the Inner World. The great desert and the Sahel is not quite as we Westerners have imagined it. The thousand year long history of amazing suffering boggles the imagination. A thousand years of thousand mile treks from South to North, untold millions of Africans were trekked across the burning sands with equally untold millions falling along the way. This is not all. This is a horror story. Welland again, p. 116:
Even after the slave trade had been suppressed, the old life of the desert survived for a while for one simple reason…the absence of salt in the Sudan. Nearly all the salt in Central Africa had always come from the north across the Sahara on the backs of camels, donkeys, horses and men. The salt mines in the middle of the most terrible wastelands of the desert- at Taghaza, at Taodeni, and at Bilma- had always been worked all the year round by Negro slaves, who died within a few years of their arrival at the mines and were immediately replaced by new workers. The salt they mined was worth its weight in gold in Timbuktu, and its transport across the desert was a considerable enterprise of unbelievable size, involving the assembling of as many as 40,000 camels to make the quick dash from Bilma to Kano.
Think of it. For a thousand years Negroes were dropped down a funnel in a steady stream to live the most miserable of lives for a very few years. Over a millennium! Think of it. I should think those Negroes who travelled the Middle Passage in the Atlantic Slave Trade ending up in the paradise of the Caribbean and the Americas should bless their deliverers from that African hell.
Africans should bless the French for delivering them from total servitude and degradation. When one digs for facts beneath the surfice, the things one finds.
Thus without giving any historical background Wren is telling the story of how Europe saved the Africans from themselves. Indeed, Hank and Buddy singlehandely rearrange North Africa on livable lines. The two, in the story, break the power of the Tuaregs while establishing an African paradise in a hundred square mile oasis. Their people are delivered into prospeirty by a million franc subsidy from France that Hank and Buddy use for the betterment of their people rather than sequestering it in a numbered Swiss bank account. A new day for Africa indeed courtesy of Western enlightenment.
Thus De Beaujolais accomplishes his mission to align the new Mahdi, Hank, with France while winning his fair heared beauty and pleasing his uncle.
Hank marries Maud the maid leaving Buddy hanging out but not for long. We still have the last of the trilogy, Beau Ideal to go. Let’s go.
Exhuming Bob 21: Will The Real Bob Dylan…?
July 27, 2009
Exhuming Bob 21:
Will The Real Bob Dylan…?
http://contemporarynotes.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/greil-marcus-bob-dylan-bill-ayers-barry-obama/
Dylan
Our friend Bob Dylan has given the impression that he knew nothing of Barry Obama, The Great Black Hope, until the summer of 2008 with just a few months left in the campaign when he gave the candidate his endorsement. Surely this isn’t so. Surely he not only knew of the Hope but knew him personally probably before 9/11/01.
In my essay Bill Ayers, Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan and Barry Obama on my Contemporary Notes blog, linked above, I posit that all four knew each other and of 9/11 before it happened. Impossible, huh? Stranger things have happened.
I hadn’t thought about it much after writing my piece but then a few days ago- 7/22/09- I came across a post by one Lark, The Times Are A Changing (Again): Bob Dylan On Obama. Lark quotes Dylan on Obama in the London Times. Let’s review it:
Dylan begins: “Well you know right now America is in a state of upheaval.”
True enough. Many sorts of upheaval. What sort of upheaval does Dylan refer to:
Bomber Billy Ayers
Poverty is demoralizing.
Can’t argue with that. Is he talking about coal miners, fruit pickers, the unemployed, or what?
You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they’re poor.
More problematic here. Purity isn’t a virtue it’s a state or condition. Has nothing to do with poverty. Well, Dylan’s a poet, one of the enigmatic kind, so I presume he may mean honest by pure. But which people, is he talking about Blacks?
Well, I come from a long line of poor people and so far as I know we were the kind described as ‘poor but honest.’ In other words we didn’t steal or cheat. I’m not sure how scrupulous we were about lieing. Seems to be a much more common fault. I’ve been around the block a few times now and I’ve come to the conclusion that crime has nothing to do with poverty. Rich or poor a thief steals and is well able to justify his thefts. Need I point out the 50 billion dollar thief Bernie Madoff? Or about the raft of Rabbis just arrested in New Jersey for some very serious financial crimes. And then I read about this reasonably well off one guy who stole some records because he thought he could use them better than the rightful owner. So it may be common to think you have to be poor to be ‘impure’ or dishonest but mistaken nevertheless.
Bob makes himself a little more clear:
But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up…Barack Obama.
Naive but sincere. Spoken like a true cheerleader. ‘This guy out there’ sounds like affection if not familiarity to me. So now, when and how did Dylan become aware of the Hope? As I conjecture it Greil Marcus is the key to the riddle. I’m guessing, but my guess is that Marcus’ curiosity led him to introduce himself or be introduced to Bill Ayers, the ole Mad Weatherman Bomber, probably in Chicago. Ayers and Marcus being of the school of Whiteness is a plague on the Earth probably quickly came into accord. And then the Hope was probably on the way under the sponsorship of Ayers so Marcus and the Hope were introduced when certain anti-American and anti-White plans were discussed probably among them a projected attack on America. Certainly one remembers that Ayers had already made several bomb attacks on America so why not the Big One…the Really Big One…the World Trade Center.
Greil Marcus
Dylan and Marcus are pretty close. Dylan is either a Lubavitcher or close to them. Lubavitchers hate Whites, especially of the Christian sort. That partially excludes me by the way, White but not of the Christian persuasion.
As it appears that Dylan was much more familiar with the Hope than he let on and his album Love And Theft seems to reflect a pre-knowledge of 9/11 coupled with Marcus’ Rolling Stone article as detailed in the link to my essay above, there is every reason to believe, or think, or fear that Dylan, Marcus, Ayers and Obama were privy to 9/11 well before it happened. Possibly if not probably in on the planning stages.
Dylan goes on: He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out.
If the Hope is redefining what a politician is then the definition is toward that of an African chief. An African chief owned every bit of his territory personally. He owned every inhabitant as his slave to dispose of as he wished. He was free to do with all as he chose with or without their consent.
That seems to be how the Hope is playing things out. True, the Hope is somewhat hobbled by the remains of the old political system but with his Liberal allies he has so far met with no insuperable resistance. To oppose his plans is to be vile. So far the fear of being considered vile has prevailed.
Then Dylan: Am I hopeful? Yes. I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.
Well things have changed. Many of us believe the way things are changing is in a direction more destructive than beneficial. In short the Hope is already a complete failure. We’d all be pleased to have a detailed opinion from Dylan on whether his hopes have been realized.
Dylan then closes with a platitude: You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future.
Yep. Sure enough. I suppose the argument would break down over the issue of what’s best or worst and which has been left behind. There’s no doubt we’re headed into the future. Some kind of future at least.
A Review: Pt. I P.C. Wren The Beau Geste Trilogy
June 23, 2009
A Contribution To The Erbzine Library Project
The Beau Ideal Trilogy Of
P.C. Wren
Beau Geste, Beau Sabreur, Beau Ideal
Review by R.E. Prindle
Part I: Introduction
Part II: Review of Beau Geste
Part III: Review Of Beau Sabreur
Part IV: Review Of Beau Ideal
P.C. Wren
For hundreds of years after the expulsion of the Moors from Spain the Moslems raided the European c0asts of the Mediterranean abducting men, women and children as slaves while also preying on shipping. The newly formed United States sought unsuccessfully to suppress this Moslem piracy. ‘Millions for defense but not one penny for tribute.’ If you remember that one from school.
Finally in 1830 France invaded, conquered and occupied what is now known as Algeria ending the Barbary Pirates.
An army corps was formed and named the Legion Etrangere in French, French Foreign Legion in English to pacify Algeria. Over the next hundred years the Legion was used for peaceful penetration into the Sahara and Sahel to form the French West African Empire.
In an astonishing turn around the Moslem power evaporated while the French easily became the masters of the bulge of Africa. The military superiority was to last until post-WWII when exhausted by two world wars accompanied by a moral collapse as the best and brightest died on the battlefields leaving nothing but singers and dancers to live off the fat of the land. The French were militarily capable but morally bankrupt. The Moslems reasserted themselves in the fifties forcing the French out of Algeria while beginning the invasion of France by peaceful penetration. A neat reversal of fortunes. Thus the conquest of Europe interrupted by the Spanish expulsion began again.
Immediately after the French invasion of Algeria the deserts of Africa beame a playground of Europeans. The lure of the desert held a strange appeal for them. Perahaps devoid of romance in their homelands the desert with its now no longer dangerous but exotic inhabitants replaced the fairies and elves displaced by the scientific revolution. The Euroamerican romance with ‘noble savages’ and ‘inferior races’ may very well be caused by the void created by the scientific revolution. Euroamericans hoped to find or create those emotional or psychological needs lost in the advance of civilization. This may explain to some extent the White worship of people of color whose ‘natural’ uninhibited behavior they profess to admire and imitate. Witness the tatooing and body piercing in imitation of the Africans who themselves appear to have to given it up.
The French having conquered Algeria had to establish an army corps dedicated to perpetual warfare. That unit was the Legion Etrangere or French Foreign Legion. The duty in the Sahara amid an enemy population was so execrable that only men without hope, that is criminals and outcasts with no other options need have applied.
In 1831 then, a year after the conquest and annexation of Algeria as an actual Department of France the French Foreign Legion was created by Louis Philippe the new Bourgeois King of France.
The Legend of the Legion apparently grew very quickly. the first legion novel is thought to be that of the English writer Ouida. She published her novel Under Two Flags in the 1860s. It was a great success ultimately being made into a movie. Alongside the Legion novels were a number of novels that dealt with the desert in a very romantic way.
The genre of novel could only have developed after the French conquest of Algeria after 1830 and a little later with the pacification of the Moslems. If not pacification at least intimidation. Astonishingly the centuries intervening between Roman Africa and the conquest of Algeria vanished from the consciousness of Europeans. In only a hundred years (well, a hundred twenty-five years) a brief interlude, Europeans were in turn expelled from North Africa with their tremendous superiority shattered and in ruins. That brief century now appears like a fairy story without real substance. A hundred years of struggle and dieing ant then- poof! But the stories were great.
Fans of Jules Verne have a very good story- The Barsac Mission- that undoubteldy was an influence of P.C. Wren. The work has only been translated recently issued in two volumes as Into The Niger Bend and The City Of The Sahara by Americor. Some consider the novel science fiction.
The publishers are escapist types who have retreated to Mattituck N.Y. at the most extreme end of Long Island. Unfortunately, as with many of Verne’s books the Barsac has been bowlderized to reflect current Liberal tastes. The translator I.O. Evans coyly expresses it this way: I have also taken the liberty, found necessary by most of Verne’s other translators, of abbreviating or omitting a few passage of minor interest. (cough, cough)
Another wonderful Sahara novel written at the same time as the Barsac is Robert Hichens’ The Garden Of Allah. Hichens was an influence on Burroughs. The novel was very well known at least through my youth. I knew people with whom Hichens’ reputation was very great although I imagine there are few who would recognize his name today.
And then ERB himself devoted a number of pages to the romance of the desert. In The Return Of Tarzan it will be remembered that Tarzan was despatched to Algeria as a French secret agent just along the lines of Wren’s De Beaujolais. The Lad And The Lion is of course a complete Sahara novel that appears to have had an influence on Wren. Korak the Killer of The Son Of Tarzan operated on the margins of the desert while the Sahara plays a frequent part in a lot of the Tarzan novels.
There is no question that E.M. Hull’s The Sheik was a major influence on Wren as he actually parodies Mrs. Hull’s novel virutally by name.
With Wren the myth of the Sahara and the Legion comes into full bloom.
If one has read only Beau Geste one has read an amazingly good story but to understand Wren’s intent it is necessary to read Beau Geste, Beau Sabreur and Beau Ideal in sequence. By the time Wren wrote, the handwriting was on the wall. The Western will had already been sapped. The beau ideals that had inspired Western men since the days of the Arthurian epics was fading from the Western consciousness being replaced by the effete homosexual ‘ideals’ of today. The strength and confidence that allowed Western man to subjugate the world was becoming just a memory. Wren in his way is either commemorating the ideals or seeking to reverse the decline.
The three novels are concerned with the fortunes of two families, one English, the other American. Wren has a wonderful feel for the difference between the English and the American characters, not to mention the French. His command of American dialect and hobo slang is virtually alone worth reading the trilogy.
The first volume, Beau Geste based on Wilkie Collins The Moonstone (a so-so read) concerns the early history of the Geste brothers, Beau, Digby and John and the story of Fort Zinderneuf away out there almost beyond a hobo’s imagination.
FFL 1939: Life Magazine
.
The novel does introduce the two American hoboes, Hank and Buddy, serving in the Legion. Wren kills off Michael and Digby Geste in this first novel putting the load on John.
In the second novel of the trilogy, Beau Sabreur (The good sword or swordsman) John returns to Africa to try to locate Hank and Buddy who were lost in the drifting sands after saving his life.
In this manner Wren introduces the American family of which Hank is a member. Hank and his friend Buddy were the two men lost in the desert that John Geste is seeking. Both men lying in the desert near death in different locations were rescued by the Bedouins. As luck would have it Hank managed to work his way up to Sheik acquiring Buddy as his vizier. They introduce superior Western discipline and tactics into their tribe giving them dominance in the desert. Hank then comes to the attention of the French as the new Mahdi. De Beaujolais is sent to coopt the new Mahdi. Through a series of adventures De Beaujolais meets and falls in love with Hank’s sister Mary who is traveling with her other brother Otis Vanbrugh. They as well as Hank are fleeing from a brutish father.
At stories end the whole cast Henri De Beaujolais who had wed Mary, Otis, Hank, Buddy, John Geste and his wife Isobel, who plays a large part, are back at the ranch in Texas facing the old brute of a father down while trying to free Hank’s other sister from thralldom to the old brute so she can marry Buddy and begin a life of her own. Hold on, now, Wren must have been studying Burroughs because he’s got a number of twists up his sleeve, or perhaps, tricks.
While Otis was in Algeria an Arab dancing girl had fallen in love with him who was apparently the queen of the desert. Otis tried to escape her but in exchange for help in recovering John from the penal battalion of the FFL he promised to marry her. Aw shucks, that’s right, you guessed it. Nakhla was in reality his sister. The old brute had fathered her on another dancing girl when he was out making deals in the desert. So we have Nakhla, the same name as the heroine of Burroughs’ The Lad And The Lion, pretty much following the plot line of The Girl From Farris’s. So maybe Wren should also be included in the Farmerian Wold Newton Universe.
So that is the broad overview of the story line that holds the three volumes together. Before I go on to the individula reviews there is one other problem I wrestle with that I would like to to discuss and that is the
Western fascination with primitive life styles.
For a convenient starting point we’ll use H. Rider Haggard, no, cancel that. I’ll go back a little further to the French Wold Newton. I’m reading the Paul Feval Black Coats series and they have some earlier antecedents. Balzac, Dumas, Eugene Sue and Feval all deal with organized crime groups. A Dumas title that I haven’t been able to get is titled The Mohicans Of Paris while Feval makes several reference to crime organizations adopting a sort of ‘red indian’ mentality. What Dumas called Mohicans evolved into the Apaches of late nineteenth century Paris. Anyone who watched TV in the fifties is familiar with French Apache dancing.
Thus while the French were becoming fascinated with the North American Indians and their primitive mentality Haggard was celebrating the primitive African mentality. And then along comes Ouida, Verne, Hichens, Burroughs, Hull and Wren celebrating the ‘free and wild’ life of the desert.
As of the beginning of the nineteenth century, if not before, the Euroamericans evolved into the Scientific Consciousness leaving the rest of the world behind in the mythopoeic or Religious Consciousness. However the transition from one consciousness to the other is not a clean break. Haggard, for instance, never really made the transition while Burroughs did. That may be why Burroughs reads as modern if a trifle old fashioned while Haggard is purely of an anterior psychology- good but just a little stodgy.
Thus, as the White Man spread over the globe, the, what I shall I call it, White Man’s Burden, White Man’s novel appeared. A whole genre of either stated or implied White superiority appeared of which Haggard and Burroughs are the most promient. From these writers the genre went on to the Sheena, Queen Of The Jungle stuff to imitative White Jungle god stories. Conrad sang the colonial era in lyric tones. Kipling told of the Raj of India while inventing the White Man’s Burden which was very real.
Ouida is usually credited with the first FFL novel, Under Two Flags, while Burroughs contributed The Return of Tarzan in which Tarzan goes to Algeria as a French secret agent although not as FFL.
In 1924 P.C. Wren wrought the glamor of the French Foreign Legion with the first novel of his trilogy, Beau Geste, followed by Beau Sabreur and Beau Ideal. These novels are also scientific demonstrating the superiority of Euroamerican intelligence over the mythopoeic mentality of the desert tribes. Merely by introducing European military discipline into the tribe Hank and Buddy enable the tribe to defeat all others and dominate the desert. This while Abd El Krim and the Riff dominated Western news instilling admiration for the primitive desert tribes over Western Civilization. I had a tearcher in high school who would get sexually aroused just talking about El Krim.
Thus while the transition from mythopoeic and scientific thinking was not complete if even half evolved the West was presented with various mythopoeic cultures that drew them back from the transition to the Scientific Consciousness. At present, then, the West has a split personality in which they admire the Negro and Arab mentality so much that they denigrate their own scientific side. It doesn’t seem likely that Euroamericans in sufficient numbers will make the transition to Scientific Consciousness quickly enough to preserve Western civilization hence the present bizarre worship of primitive races in North America and Europe. On the other hand the rest of the world seeks to imitate the West in matters that they cannot understand or sustain on their own. If the West is in trouble imagine the actual psychological state of things in China and India.
Now it is time to move on the first of the reviews- Beau Geste.
A Contribution To The
Erbzine Library Project.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Science And Spiritualism
Camille Flammarion, Scientist and Spiritualist
by
R.E. Prindle
The last story in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles is about the expulsion from Earth of the various supernatural or imaginary beings such as fairies, elves, the elementals, all those beings external to ourselves but projections of our minds on Nature, to Mars as a last resort and how they were all dieing as Mars became scientifically accessible leaving no place for them to exist.
On Earth the rejection of such supernatural beings began with the Enlightenment. When the smoke and fury of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic years settled and cleared it was a new world with a completely different understanding of the nature of the world. Science, that is, knowing, had displaced belief as a Weltanschauung.
The old does not give way so easily to the new. Even while knowing that fairies did not exist the short lived reaction of the Romantic Period with its wonderful stories and fictions followed the Napoleonic period.
Supernatural phenomena displaced from the very air we breathed reformed in the minds of Men as the ability of certain people called Mediums to communicate with spirits although the spirits were no longer called supernatural but paranormal. Thus the fairies morphed into dead ancestors, dead famous men, communicants from beyond the grave. Men and women merely combined science with fantasy. Science fiction, you see.
Spiritualism was made feasible by the rediscovery of hypnotism by Anton Mesmer in the years preceding the French Revolution. The first modern glimmerings of the sub- or unconscius began to take form. The unconscious was the arena of paranormal activity.
Hypnotism soon lost scientific credibility during the mid-century being abandoned to stage performers who then became the first real investigators of the unconscious as they practiced their art.
While the antecedents of spiritualism go back much further the pehnomena associated with it began to make their appearance in the 1840s. Because the unconscious was so little understood spiritualism was actually thought of as scientific. The investigators of the unconscious gave it incredible powers and attributes, what I would call supernatural but which became known as paranormal. Communicating with spirits, teleportation, telecommunications, all the stuff that later became the staples of science fiction.
Thus in 1882, Jean-Martin Charcot, a doctor working in the Salpetriere in Paris made hypnotism once again a legitimate academic study.
The question here is how much innovation could the nineteenth century take without losing its center or balance. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming presents the situation well. Freud, who was present at this particular creation, was to say that three discoveries shattered the confidence of Man; the first was the Galilean discovery that the Earth was not the center of the universe, the second revelation was Darwin’s announcement that Man was not unique in creation and the last was the discovery of the unconscious. Of these three the last two happened simultaneiously amidst a welter of scientific discoveries and technological applications that completely changed Man’s relationship to the world. One imagines that these were the reasons for the astonishing literary creativity as Victorians grappled to deal with these new realities. There was a sea change in literary expression.
Key to understanding these intellectual developments is the need of Man for immortality. With God in his heaven but disconnected from the world supernatural explanations were no longer plausible. The longing for immortality remained so FWH Myers a founder of the Society For Psychical Research changed the word supernatural into paranormal. As the notion of the unconscious was now wedded to science and given, in effect, supernatural powers under the guise of the paranormal it was thought, or hoped, that by tapping these supernormal powers one could make contact with the departed hence spiritism or Spiritualism.
While from our present vantage point after a hundred or more years of acclimatizing ourselves to an understanding of science, the unconscious and a rejection of the supernatural, the combination of science and spiritualism seems ridiculous. Such was not the case at the time. Serious scientists embraced the notion that spirtualism was scientific.
Now, a debate in Burroughs’ studies is whether and/or how much Burroughs was influenced by the esoteric. In my opinion and I believe that of Bibliophile David Adams, a great deal. David has done wonderful work in esbatlishing the connection between the esotericism of L. Frank Baum and his Oz series of books and Burroughs while Dale Broadhurst has added much.
Beginning in the sixties of the nineteenth century a French writer who was to have a great influence on ERB, Camille Flammarion, began writing his scientific romances and astronomy books. Not only did Flammarion form ERB’s ideas of the nature of Mars but this French writer was imbued with the notions of spiritualism that informed his science and astronomy. He and another astronomer, Percival Lowell, who is often associated with ERB, in fact, spent time with Flammarion exchanging Martian ideas. Flammarion and Lowell are associated.
So, in reading Flammarion ERB would have imbibed a good deal of spiritualistic, occult, or esoteric ideas. Flammarion actually ended his days as much more a spiritualist than astronomer. As a spiritualist he was associated with Conan Doyle.
Thus in the search for a new basis of immortality, while the notion of God became intenable, Flammarion and others began to search for immortality in outer space. There were even notions that spirits went to Mars to live after death somewhat in the manner of Bradbury’s nixies and pixies. In his book Lumen Flammarion has his hero taking up residence on the star Capella in outer space after death. Such a book as Lumen must have left Burroughs breathless with wonderment. Lumen is some pretty far out stuff in more ways than one. After a hundred fifty years of science fiction these ideas have been endlessly explored becoming trite and even old hat but at the time they were
Camille Flammarion
excitingly new. Flammarion even put into Burroughs’ mind that time itself had no independent existence. Mind boggling stuff.
I believe that by now Bibliophiles have assembled a library of books that Burroughs either did read or is likely to have read before 1911 that number at least two or three hundred. Of course, without radio, TV, or movies for all of Burroughs’ childhood, youth and a major portion of his young manhood, although movies would have become a reality by the time he began writing, there was little entertainment except reading. Maybe a spot of croquet.
As far as reading goes I suspect that ERB spent a significant portion of his scantily employed late twenties and early thirties sitting in the Chicago Library sifting through the odd volume. It can’t be a coincidence that Tarzan lounged for many an hour in the Paris library before he became a secret agent and left for North Africa.
I have come across a book by the English author Charles Howard Hinton entitled Scientific Romances of which one explores the notion of a fourth dimension . Hinton is said to have been an influence on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. It seems certain that Burroughs read The Time Machine while he would have found many discussions of the fourth dimension as well as other scientific fantasies in the magazines and even newspapers as Hillman has so amply demonstrated on ERBzine. We also know that ERB had a subscription to Popular Mechanics while probably reading Popular Science on a regular basis. Popular Science was established in 1872.
It is clear that ERB was keenly interested in psychology and from references distributed throughout the corpus, reasonably well informed.
I wouldn’t go so far as to maintain that ERB read the French psychologist Theodore Flournoy’s From India To The Planet Mars but George T. McWhorter does list it as a volume in Vern Corriel’s library of likely books read by Burroughs. The book was published in 1899 just as Burroughs was entering his very troubled period from 1900 to 1904-05 that included his bashing in Toronto with subsequent mental problems, a bout with typhoid fever and his and Emma’s flight to Idaho and Salt Lake City. So that narrows the window down a bit.
However the book seems to describe the manner in which his mind worked so that it provides a possible or probable insight into the way his mind did work.
ERB’s writing career was born in desperation. While he may say that he considered writing unmanly it is also true that he tried to write a lighthearted account of becoming a new father a couple years before he took up his pen in seriousness. Obviously he saw writing as a way out. His life had bittely disappointed his exalted expectations hence he would have fallen into a horrible depression probably with disastrous results if the success of his stories hadn’t redeemed his opinion of himself.
Helene Smith the Medium of Fluornoy’s investigation into mediumship was in the same situation. Her future while secure enough in the material sense, as was Burroughs, fell far short of her hopes and expectations. Thus she turned to mediumship to realize herself much as Burroughs turned to literature. She enjoyed some success and notoriety attracting the attention of, among others, the psychologist Theodore Flournoy. Fournoy who enjoyed some prominence at the time, was one of those confusing spiritualism with science because of his misunderstanding of the unconscious. Thus as Miss Smith unfolded her conversations with the inhabitants of Mars it was taken with some plausibility.
If any readers I may have have also read my review of Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson he or she will remember that Peter and Mary were restricted in their dream activities to only what they had done, seen and remembered or learned. As I have frequently said, you can only get out of a mind what has gone into it. In this sense Miss Smith was severely handicapped by an inadequate education and limited experience. While she was reasonably creative in the construction of her three worlds- those of ancient India, Mars and the court of Marie Antoinette- she was unable to be utterly convincing. In the end her resourcefulness gave out and the scientific types drifted away. She more or less descended into a deep depression as her expectations failed. Had she been more imagination she might have turned to writing as Burroughs did.
If Burroughs did read Flournoy, of which I am not convinced, he may have noted that Miss Smith’s method was quite similar to his habit of trancelike daydreaming that fulfilled his own expectations of life in fantasy.
In Burroughs’ case he had the inestimable advantage of having stuffed his mind with a large array of imaginative literature, a fairly good amateur’s notions of science and technology, along with a very decent range of valuable experience. His younger days were actually quite exciting. He was also gifted with an amazing imagination and the ability to use it constructively.
Consider this possibility. I append a poem that he would have undoubtedly read- When You Were A Tadpole And I Was A Fish. Read this and then compare it to The Land That Time Forgot.
Evolution
by
Langdon Smith
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.
Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Til we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into light again.
We were Amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man’s hand;
We coiled at ease ‘neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand.
Croaking and blind, with out three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.
Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was past.
Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights;
And, oh! what beautiful years were there
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.
Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change,
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing side
The shadows broke and the soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.
I was thewed like Auroch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair,
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o’er the plain
And the moon hung red o’er the river bed
We mumbled the bones of the slain.
I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft;
Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone
And slew him upon the brink.
Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin,
From west and east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.
O’er joint and gristle and padded hoof
We fought and clawed and tore,
And cheek by jowl with many a growl
We talked the marvel o’er.
I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand,
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Till our brutal tush were gone.
And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico’s.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet-
Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones
And deep in the Coralline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?
God has wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnished them wings to fly;
He sowed our spawn in the world’s dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-bone men make war
And the oxwain creaks o’er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.
Then as we linger at luncheon here
O’er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.
With something like that stuffed into his subconscious what wonders might ensue. Obviously The Land That Time Forgot and The Eternal Lover.
As Miss Smith had turned to spiritualism and mediumship, Burroughs turned his talents to writing. According to himself he used essentially mediumistic techniques in hiswriting. He said that he entered a tracelike state, what one might almost call automatic writing to compose his stories. He certainly turned out three hundred well written pages in a remarkably short time with very few delays and interruptions. He was then able to immediately begin another story. This facility lasted from 1911 to 1914 when his reservoir of stored material ws exhausted. His pace then slowed down as he had to originate stories and presumably work them out more rather than just spew them out.
Curiously like Miss Smith he created three main worlds with some deadends and solo works. Thus while Miss Smith created Indian, Martian and her ‘Royal’ identity Burroughs created an inner World, Tarzan and African world, and a Martian world.
Perhaps in both cases three worlds were necessary to give expression to the full range of their hopes and expectations. In Burroughs’ case his worlds correspond to the equivalences of the subconscious in Pellucidar, the conscious in Tarzan and Africa and shall we say, the aspirational or spiritual of Mars. In point of fact Burroughs writing style varies in each of the three worlds, just as they did in Miss Smith’s.
Having exhausted his early intellectual resources Burroughs read extensively and exhaustively to recharge his intellectual batteries. This would have been completely normal because it is quite easy to write oneself out. Indeed, he was warned about this by his editor, Metcalf. Having, as it were, gotten what was in your mind on paper what you had was used up and has to be augmented. One needs fresh experience and more knowledge. ERB was capable of achieving this from 1911 to about 1936 when his resources were essentially exhausted. Regardless of what one considers the quality of the later work it is a recap, a summation of his work rather than extension or innovatory into new territory. Once again, not at all unusual.
As a child of his times his work is a unique blend of science and spiritualism with the accent on science. One can only conjecture how he assimiliated Camille Flammarion’s own unique blend of spiritualism and science but it would seem clear that Flammarion inflamed his imagination setting him on his career as perhaps the world’s first true science-fiction writer as opposed to merely imaginative or fantasy fiction although he was no mean hand at all.
Exhuming Bob XX: Bob And Johnny: In Defense Of Dylan
May 31, 2009
Exhuming Bob XX:
Bob And Johnny:
In Defense Of Dylan
by
R.E. Prindle
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/dylans-view-of-cash-shortchanges-legacy-1756667.html
The least said, the soonest mended.
In Dylan’s recent interview published by Rolling Stone Magazine Dylan raised his own litle fire storm. 
Whatever his intent the appearance was that he was trashing Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, both more important and stellar than himself.
Both Presley and Cash were originators while what followed including Dylan were epigones. Accident of time, like it or not, Dylan and the rest are derivatives. They can never exceed their masters. So Dylan should have retained his modesty. However I come not to bash Bob but to defend him.
While I think there is a growing arrogance in his attitude as he seems to be beginning to believe his press releases, and while with Cash there may be something else going on in the background, yet, I am in sympathy with his opinion but not to the point of blackguarding Cash, I just listen to my favorites, among which is Big River, when I listen. That isn’t too often anymore.
One who did take deep offence to Dylan’s comments was fellow artist Joe Jackson of the pointy shoes in the Irish Times:
… in the Rolling Stone interview, which was reprinted in last weeks Sunday Times, Bobby,
baby, finally revealed himself to be a musical illiterate, in one quintessential sense, when he stupidly dismissed as “low grade” everything Johnny Cash recorded after leaving Sun Records in 1958.
Dylan didn’t express himself very well, but he is a sort of an authority, he was there while Joe only heard Cash well after the fact having therefore a historical perspective having probably heard the old stuff after he heard the new stuff. Dylan was born in ’41 while Jackson was born in ’54. It therefore behooves someone born in ’54 to be rather circumspect in criticizing the opinion of someone who was there or almost there. I’ve got three years on Bob and was actually there at the creation. Dylan’s taste in music is nevertheless impeccable.
As I say, Jackson knows early Cash only in a historical sense. Time dulls all brilliance. No one can really
- Joe Jackson at 52
understand the effect of the music of Johnny Cash on the people who were there if they weren’t.
The early Sun of Cash was volcanic, other worldly, the equivalent of five or six of those mushroom clouds over Hiroshima. And remember, as a country artist Cash debuted in heavy traffic, the greatest of the great where reaching their apogee- that is to say Hank Snow and Webb Pierce and a host of other lesser lights but still greats. Dylan and I both revere Hank Snow, hey little buddy? Webb is unbelievable so into this milieu strides Johnny Cash with three or four mind stunners followed by I Walk The Line, not to mention writing Warren Smith’s Rock n’ Roll Ruby. Now, not everybody got it at the time, you had to be hep, you had to know in your guts. We were the congnoscenti. Of course by Line the word was out.
But these records of incomparable genius were as we said at the time Cash’s wad, after he shot it every thing was of a lesser quality; even on Sun, he followed up with Ballad Of The Teenage Queen and other such drivel only for the die hards of which I was one but I knew the best of Cash was in the past. Dylan apparently did too but that early flowering was enough to respect Cash forever. Dylan should have expressed himself differently. After all it was Cash’s endorsement that opened much wider horizons to Dylan.
Pushed by the interviewer further Dylan was quoted:
I tell people if they are interested that they should listen to the Johnny on his Sun Records and reject all the notorious low grade stuff he did in later years. It can’t hold a candlelight to the frightening depth of the man you have on early records. That’s the way he should be remembered.
That seems unduly harsh about a singer who followed his Sun hits with Ring Of Fire and many other excellent recordings although he may not have written them. In any event Dylan’s career parallels that of Cash: A short burst of relative genius followed by a long tedious fifty years.
So while I sympathize with Joe Jackson’s outrage at Dylan’s inexplicable gaucherie I understand what Dylan means. He was there and Joe Jackson wasn’t and that’s the difference, different memories. What was it Zappa said? Shut up and play yer guitar.
I fondly remember both Cash’s and Dylan’s best.
Cool Cat Jackson
A Review
Catherine James
Dandelion: Memoir Of A Free Spirit
by
R.E. Prindle
I looked at the sea and it seemed to say,
“I took your baby from you away.”
I heard a voice cryin’ in the deep,
Come join me baby in my endless sleep.
Ran in the water, heart full of fear,
There in the breakers I saw her near.
Reached for my darlin’, held her to me,
Stole her away from the angry sea.
-Jody Reynolds- The Endless Sleep
Texts:
Des Barres, Pamela: Let’s Spend The Night Together, Chapter- The Elusive Miss James, Chicago Review Press, 2008
James, Catherine: Dandelion Memoir Of A Free Spirit, St. Martin’s, 2007
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/a-review-pamela-des-barres-lets-spend-the-night-together/
Dandelion by Catherine James is an excellent read whether you consider it a memoir, a novel, or based on a true story. As a memoir it is a little too sketchy, while as a novel it is a charming read with some effective, real touches of pathos. The tenderly related death scenes of her Grandmother and mother may not rank with the passing of Little Nell but they do choke you up a bit.
Dandelion was apparently written by Miss James unaided by a co-author. When one considers that she had no schooling beyond the seventh grade this is a remarkable achievement. In the explanation of her skill, apart from a native intelligence, at a rather advanced age she returned to Jr. College where she took a writing class apparently with good effect. After a remarkable childhood and youth she is now entering an equally remarkable old age, uh, maturity.
Miss James had a childhood a bit out of the ordinary in its horridness, a crazy mother, and a succession of housing changes including a stint in a reformatory and a couple years in an orphanage. My own childhood experiences parallel those of Miss James to some extent so I think I can write of her situation with some sympathy.
Miss james’ narrative is a coherent psychological whole progressing from beginning to end in an impressive manner, but I am only going to deal with the first half of her memoir.
I understand the following: Catherine’s mother, Diana, was vain of her appearance while aspiring to a recording and performing career. She did succeed in recording an LP titled Dian And The Greenbrier Boys. I’m guessing that she had no intention of having children but as she married at seventeen on an impulse Catherine is probably a result of that impulse.
Diana probably then resented her daughter for inhibiting her ability to realize her ambitions. She then took her frustrations out on her child. She apparently developed a Hydelike personality in relation to her child. Mad to the nth degree. On her death bed she c0nfessed to Catherine that ‘the witches got her.’ One assumes then that Diana was what in the old days was known as being ‘possessed’ by the ‘witches’ when she was around her child. In a manner of speaking she wasn’t responsible for her actions toward her daughter. She was severely psychotic.
By all rights Miss James should have developed into a schizophrenic. That she didn’t is the result of peculiarity of mind that I share. Like Miss James I had some difficult years and like her I was able to maintain a separate identity in a world seemingly insane.
When Catherine’s mother divorced her father she was placed in a high class orphanage, call it a boarding school perhaps, for a period of time. Understandably Catherine’s notion of time is hazily remembered at this period although she seems to have retained startlingly clear memories beginning from about the year two. Catherine has no memory of an explanation being given to her for the removal to the boarding school. It just happened one day. She was inexplicably dropped off where she remained uncontested by any of her family until one day Grandmother Mimi picked her up from the home. Catherine lived for perhaps two years with her grandparents without any communication from mother until for some reason her mother reclaimed her. Perhaps because she had remarried. The marriage flopped and after some time her mother took up with Travis Edmundson (deceased this year) of the Bud and Travis folk duo. Her mother had aspirations to be a folksinger having, as mentioned, actually recorded an album as Dian And The Greenbrier Boys. Dian was shortened from Diana. More exotic.
According to Catherine Travis was as bizarre as her mother with the result that at the tender age of ten or eleven she left the house. The police picked her up but she refused to give them any information. Stangely they sent her to Los Padrinos Girl’s Reformatory in Downey, California. She either was or believes she was committed until she was eighteen. This seems extraordinary to me, although stranger things have happened I’m sure. But to lock a very young girl up without charges, trial and sentencing for six or seven years boggles the mind.
With her child safely behind bars, Diana renounced her daughter making her a ward of the State. Good God! Talk about cruel and inhuman. One can’t be sure exactly what Catherine knew of what was going on but Diana and Travis refused to allow the girl to be released to her grandparents care. Since her mother had made the girl a ward of the State it isn’t clear what she would have had to say about it. Her grandparents now sought to reclaim her but after legal maneuvers the best they could do for her was to get her released to an orphanage. Orphanages are slight improvements over lockups.
Here Catherine becomes intentionally vague. Her grandfather was named Al Newman and he wrote musical scores for the movies. The only Al Newman who wrote for the movies I have been able to locate over the internet is Alfred Newman. Alfred Newman wrote scores for about a hundred movies receiving an incredible amount of awards. Catherine mentions that when she was staying with her grandparents a large number of Hollywood film people visited the home including Harpo and Chico Marx. I would assume that she is coyly indicating that her grandparents were the Alfred Newmans.
If that’s so then her mother’s maiden name was Diana Newman and Randy Newman must therefore be Catherine’s cousin. Now, she was placed in a country club Jewish orphanage. Her grandfather Al Newman, she tells us, was a benefactor of the orphanage, so she assumes that is what got a Catholic girl into a Jewish orphanage. If Al Newman was a benefactor then whether he was the famous Alfred Newman who was Jewish or not, Al Newman must have been Jewish. In that case it shouldn’t have been that difficult to place her in the Jewish orphanage. Even so, she says, she was not allowed to visit her grandparents on weekends. An inexplicable lack of clout, but this is Catherine’s story.
She implies that efforts were made to convert her from Catholicism to Judaism which she stoutly resisted. This all requires some clarification here. She nevertheless learned Hebrew and could at the time recite some Jewish prayers in the language. She was in the orphanage for about two years from eleven or twelve to fourteen.
Once agains this seems odd. Things are done differently in different places no doubt but I also spent a couple years in the municipal orphanage which was much less posh than the place she describes. She says they gave her good food; the food in our place was so execrable that I virtually didn’t eat for the two years. She implies she had rather been in a Catholic orphanage but I do believe I can disabuse her of that notion. An orphanage immediately declasses the inmates placing them outside society so that upon entry a child becomes a societal outcast.
In the municipal orphanage we were pretty free to come and ago as we chose provided we were back for dinner but even if we hadn’t I’m not so sure anything would or could have been done about it. We were a coed facility but the kids were moved out into foster homes at ten to avoid the inevitable sexual problems of old boys among younger girls and boys so I’m surprised Catherine was allowed to stay until she was fourteen.
I have a little experience with a Catholic orphanage. There was one down the street from our place. This place was a hell hole. The municipal orphanage had a chain link fence around it but the Catholic place had a ten foot high brick wall. The difference between that and Los Padrinos was non-existent. Los Padrinos guards probably were more lenient than the nuns and priests. The latter were not lovely people. We used to be invited to the Catholic home for special occasions like Catholic movies and other events. They used to show the Catholic kids what the world outside their institution looked like through the movies. Like they say, no matter how bad off you are there are others worse off but of course that doesn’t improve your own situation. I was very happy to return to the municipal home after visiting the Catholic home. I think I ran all the way back.
Theirs was a rough life. I’ll tell you a little story.
Catherine mentions that kids at the Jr. High she attended didn’t want to have anything to do with orphans. True in spades all over the world. We had this kid, all this happened to him in one year, who began the school year with the Catholics. Those kids were schooled on premises, I’m not kidding you, they never saw the outside world, never. His parents transferred him to the municipal home where he had to try to fit into the public school we were abused at. Then he was transferred back to the Catholic home. I was never so happy to see anyone leave as I was him. He was already stark raving mad. Then they transferred the kid back to the municipal home. Barely holding unto to my own sanity the bastard was pushing me over the edge when fate intervened once again and he was sent back to the Catholic home. I have no idea who or what he imagined he was by that time. I had enough trouble surviving in the public school without switching back and forth. Of course, with the right attitude it would have been a real learning experience but I hadn’t learned to dissociate like that yet. I lived in total fear he would return.
A couple years later after my mother remarried and we moved into a garage I was reading the paper where I read that this kid, having returned to his parents from the Catholic home, locked all the doors of the house one night and torched it incinerating parents, siblings and himself. I was shocked when I recognized who they were writing about. I understood the situation expliclitly. I had to keep my mouth shut of course but I lustily cheered what he had done although I certainly would not have burned myself up. What could they do to you that already hadn’t been done? It would just be a move from one institution to another. I’m sure this kid was thought of as the ‘monster.’ Nobody knew the trouble he’d seen, man’s inhumanity to man. Well, we all have our crosses to bear.
He was an extreme case but not that far gone compared to the rest of us. Getting to my point with Catherine. The boys in the orphanage tended toward violent reactions, rebillion as it was amusingly called. I would imagine most of them became criminals of one stripe or another. The girls on the other hand responded to their emotional neglect by offering themselves to anyone who would give them seemingly tender attention. And there were a lot of them waiting to do that. The fence of the orphanage was lined with perverts hitting on their preference- either boys or girls eight to ten years old. Cops said there was no way they could run them off. Free country. Whoever said this wasn’t a great country, right?
So, at puberty, Miss James fled the orphanage, unchaperoned, into the great wide world with an instiable desire to be loved and somehow regain her social status as provided by the Al Newmans. She fled into a world of rock ‘n roll where unlimited opportunites with guitar ‘gods’ existed. This was a unique historical opportunity to realize her desires. A couple years earlier…?
The story she tells must be a severely edited and corrected version of the reality. One wonders what really happened.
Let me explain the genesis of this review. I wrote a review of Miss Pamela’s ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’ in which I was critical of Miss James’ claim that she met Bob Dylan while in an orphanage. She appended a comment to the review suggesting I reread Miss Pamela and then read her own book- Dandelion. As she said, she doesn’t make things up. All right. I did both. As I say, I am sympathetic to any former alumnus of Orphanage U. but you don’t want to drift too far off the band in your reminiscing; that way lies madness. Who wants to burn their own house down except for the irretrievably damaged- destroyed.
Miss James’ book of adventures is very tightly edited to produce a certain effect or opinion of the author while not all her memories check out. Not terribly unusual in itself but she tries very hard to convince you that she is absolutely truthful and accurate. I will say I’m getting a heck of an education checking her stories out though. As they fit in with my agenda I have no problem with that. The extension of my folk knowledge through the investigation of Bud and Travis has been very beneficial.
Miss James career was essentially from 1965 (possibly very late ’64) to 1970. That’s five years more or less. She managed to live two or three lifetimes in those years. Ah, the sixties, weren’t those the times though?
Her mother’s agent who was hot after a ten, eleven or twelve year old Catherine was named Jim Dickson (Catherine says some names have been changed so…but then there was a Jim Dickson, talent scout and producer who helped work up the Byrds around LA at that time.) He was working with the Byrds in ’63-’64 and he had something to do with Dylan according to Miss James. The orphanage would barely allow Al Newman, a large benefactor of the home to visit his grand-daughter and yet they allowed an adult unrelated male to pick a 13 year old girl up and drive away with her. Well, OK, if Catherine says so…
Dickson then took her to a Dylan concert. Dylan was in LA in May and/or June of ’63 for a short time according to biographer, Sounes, and again in ’64. In ’63 Catherine, who certainly must have looked young, if Dickson hadn’t told Dylan that she was 13, says that Dylan asked her to a party where he spent, she says, several hours sitting talking to her while ignoring the big girls and execs. Well, I don’t know, but I doubt it. I can’t imagine how Dickson explained things to the orphanage when he brought Catherine back in the wee small hours of the morning.
Dylan was interested in her, she says, to the extent that every time he came to town he called on her at the orphanage. These were in addition to the ’63 and ’64 visits so it is difficult to account for them. Hard to believe, but as we’ll see she says all these famous rock musicians beat a path to her door, she didn’t pursue them.
Al Newman’s influence with the orphanage notwithstanding his large contributions was pretty limited so that he would have been unable to prevent Catherine being sent back to the reformatory which was then proposed. One night she scooted out the back door to take her chances. Brave girl; I shudder to think of it.
She says she took two hours to hoof it down to the Troubadour Folk Club at the junction of Melrose and Santa Monica. Doug Weston founded the club in ’57 and this was early ’64. Catherine is usually shy about identifying the seasons so one can’t pinpoint time within any given year. She says because her step-father Travis of Bud and Travis was a performer there she was also allowed to perform at the troubadour as a twelve or thirteen year old. Seems like a trifle of a stretch; she gives us no idea of her repertoire, Mary Had A Little Lamb or whatever.
In two short hours the orphanage had missed her presence, not very likely in my experience, divined that she was headed for the Troubadour, called the plice who were already on the spot passing her picture around: Seen this here thirteen year old around here, anywheres? OK. Sure, why wouldn’t the cops have her photo already on file? Handy.
Rather than turning tail she slips into the club ascending the balcony to the right rear seat that just happened to be the only seat left. I didn’t get to the Troubadour until the early seventies. Saw Pentangle there. I din’t go back. The club was already on the way to becoming the rough place it became. Anyway I know where she’s talking about.
This girl cannot possibly have looked, spoken or acted any older than she was. She tells the guy next to her to pretend he knows her. She later describes this guy to be in his early twenties although he was only nineteen. He obligingly wraps his arm around a 13 year old. Alright! That’s a chance I wouldn’t have taken. Probably worth twenty to life in California and we had been terrorized at the prospect of statutory rape. That was when you looked cross eyed at underage which was against the statutes.
Catherine tells him all those cops swarming the place are after her. Can he get her out of there? Nothing daunted by anything like a statutory rape charge he throws his jacket over her shoulders and he and 13 year old Catherine stroll out right under the noses of the coppers. I think I saw that movie.
The Good Sam turns out to be the brother of John Stewart of the Kingson Trio, Michael. In 1964 he was up at San Francisco State where he was forming the We Five but at the time he hadn’t. You Were On My Mind was a year in the future. He first drops her off at a house with a whole bunch of guys way back in the hills but she was not afraid. Michael then drives her North to Mill Valley, remember those statutory rape laws if caught, and brother John’s house where she is taken in as a nanny, and California’s Most Wanted Child, for his kids. The Stewarts want to adopt her which is her cue to split. It is amazing how lovable this troubled child is.
As I say, I’ve been researching these astounding stories. The problem with this one is that John Stewart was single at the time not marrying until 1968 when he wed Buffy Ford. This story is definitely on the shaky side so that affects Catherine’s credibility a little more than somewhat.
Traveling to Berkeley with some ‘hippie’ kids she hit the high spot of fabled Telegraph Avenue. Hippy kids seem a stretcher in ’64. Now, we’re on home ground though. I was around Berkeley a bit from ’64-’66. she appears to be describing a later edition of Telegraph. In ’64 the street was in transition from trad collegiate to what it later became. It was the first time I had ever been panhandled. Some girl wanted 3.98 to get her dog out of the vet. Could have been Catherine for all I know. Naw, this girl was well past 13.
On Telegraph she chances into the son of Barbara Dane and Rolf Cahn. Cahn, a guitarist, is living up at Inverness on the ocean side of Marin County. The younger Cahn puts her up at a sorority, which might seem plausible unless you’ve met some of those stuck ups. To get her over to Inverness he invents the story that the police are passing pictures around. Well, they couldn’t find Patty Hearst a couple years later either. Not to worry, his bed in Inverness awaits. Just one look was all it too, having his fill of her he splits the next morning with no intention of returning. His dad also splits leaving her alone in the house. A different world than I grew up in, no offense. These things can happen, I don’t say they don’t, but ten or fifteen in a row is worthy of Guiness.
The next day this guy from Boston shows up looking for Rolf, he’s a music lover. Likes the stuff, flew out from Boston to listen to Rolf for an afternoon. He is vastly amused at this endlessly charming 13 year old offering to fly her back to Boston with him which offer she accepts.
Once in Boston she’s hot to get to NYC so someone going that way offers to drive her down to the East Village while Dr. Cummins, for that was his name, gives her a twenty for bus fare back. Am I going too fast? Catherine tells a fast paced story.
Now, in NYC where Dylan mostly hangs out she has to locate this lad who found her so charming in California. We’ve moved up from ’63 to very late ’64 or early ’65 so Bob is heading into the thick of his ’64-’66 epiphany. Thanks to Peter Paul and Mary he is now – Somebody. Things are rollin’ for Bob.
At this point Catherine tells two different stories. In her memoir she calls Woodstock where she says a woman answers and informs her that Dylan has gone on tour. In Miss Pamela’s book she says she asked some kids where to find Bob Dylan. Dylan obligingly pulls to a stop in front of her, slow moving traffic. She runs over to say hi. Dylan rolls down the window, coldly says he’s on his way to a concert, driving off. She made no further attempt to contact him and he would have been easy to find.
Alright, I read and reread. What am I supposed to believe?
So, this is 1965, the next five years are truly spectacular. Unlike any other groupie I’ve ever heard of the rock stars gravitated toward the now fifteen year old Miss James with no effort on her part. She doesn’t have to shriek for their attention or bare her boobs, she’s stunning and they come running. Here she makes another minor error. She says she sees Morrison and The Doors performing Light My Fire in NYC. A couple of years ahead of the facts. A small error doesn’t mean much but what about the rest.
From this point on in order to create an impression of herself Catherine severely edits the facts distorting the reality at the least, what one puts in, what one leaves out.
In ’65 she met Denny Laine, make-up naturally fooled him, although still young she is now 15. Close but still statutory. I’m surprised the Moodies were in the US in ’65 because Go Now, their first hit, didn’t make that big an impression. Still, on their website the Moodies describe themselves as part of the British Invasion. In my experience they didn’t hit until ’68.
The two met more or less formally at a party so the meeting was formalized rather than a groupie-star existential encounter. Catherine always wishes to create a meeting Southern Belle style where the stars are impressed by her as much as she is by them. “Oh, Rhett, you don’t mean it?’
Laine forms the central theme of her groupie years. She has a child by him which carries her into seventeen and 1967. It isn’t easy creating a time frame or setting for her cast of characters. During the three years 1967-1970 she has relations of some sort with the following without mentioning Bob Dylan who dropped off the radar in 1965.
Roger Daltrey
David Gilmour
John Mayall
Jimmy Webb
Roman Polanski
Jimi Hendrix
Jimmy Page
Eric Clapton
Jackson Browne
Ginger Baker
Mick Jagger
Geno, partner in Granny Takes A Trip
+ Denny Laine
As you can see it is a regular A list. George Harrison could be included but she had no relations with him, just a friend.
Catherine doesn’t mention Geno or David Gilmour herself. Miss Pamela provides that in Spend The Night. The gig with Geno and Miss Pamela also took a couple months. Miss Pamela came to England with Geno’s partner. The four then took up residence together all sleeping in the same bed with baby Damian in a crib in the corner. He must have a Freudian memory or two.
Catherine artfully tells her groupie career bringing the story to a grand climax before she throws in the towel and tries to establish a life as a respectable hausfrau. The apex of groupiedom was Mick Jagger. A story made the rounds at the time of a groupie who finally made it to the bed of Mick. When asked how he was the next day, her reply was: Well, he was OK, but he was no Mick Jagger.
Catherine characteristically was wooed by Mick, herself doing no chasing. She was staying at Eric Clapton’s when Mick came over for a party. Catherine tells it this way:
I remember being engrossed in a book in the study when he peeked in and said: “You’re pretty.” With a blush, all I could think to say was a faint “thank you”, and went back to reading my book.
Just like a debutante Catherine was engrossed in her book. As the party got into swing and as the mescaline punch was about to hit Catherine thought to call Denny Laine while still coherent.
As I was speaking with Denny, Mick came into the room and closed the door behind him. I was seated at the desk in a regal, antique high-back chair with ornate carved arms. Mick walked up next to me and just stood there. He was wearing these delicious black-and-white checkered houndstooth wool trousers with a soft cotton white shirt. When I looked over, all I could see was the undulating moving pattern of the houndstooth. Mick didn’t say a word, but I felt the electricity. He was clearly waiting for me to get off the phone.
I think that’s pretty effective writing for a girl who barely finished grade school. Obviously she put her time to good use after giving up the life. Just picture sweet Lady Catherine sitting there as her Prince Charming came into her life, ‘regal, antique, high backed chair with ornate carved arms!’
The above passage is for the girls who never made it with Jagger. You can just hear Miss James cooing: Eat your hearts out girls.
Catherine not only has one night with Mick but moves into the mansion for ‘a couple of months’. The absolute untopable climax comes next.
For the event I wore my long, whimsical, gypsy dress from the posh Ozzie Clark’s boutique. The velvet bodice was formfitting, buttoning down to a billowing skirt of colored silk layers. My pale pink platform boots with appliqued silver cresent moons and stars from Granny Takes A Trip went perfectly with my outfit. Stevie Wonder was the hottest ticket in town, and I felt like a female divinity sitting between Mick and Eric, taking in Mr. Wonder’s stellar performance.
Yes, there was the fairy princess sitting with not one but two Prince Charmings watching Stevie Wonder. There was no way to top that so apparently Catherine’s philosophy was quit while you’re on top. I quite agree with her if you know when that is. And thus perhaps after having gratified one compensatory fantasy she returned to the US to begin her redemption by hard work. As she has written this book she apparently did that too.
After knowing all those rock gods so intimately I think it noteworthy that only Roger Daltrey deigned to write a blurb for the jacket. He and Miss Pamela.
The book was a very interesting read leading me to some other interesting discoveries that added substance to my understanding of the era. I have Miss James to thank for that.
As an alumnus of the orphanage, and believe me orphanages are all one form of horror story or another, I have solidarity with Miss James and wish her well. I’m sure everything she wrote was based on the facts but I still want some corroboration for the Dylan bit.
Miss James’ book has enjoyed some success. My copy is of the second printing so she sold out the first. At the last check the title was listed as about the 100,000th best seller on Amazon. I’m not sneering, mine is at about 5,500,000.
If anyone likes horror stories of this nature may I direct them to my description of an orphanage- Far Gresham Vol. I- that can be found at reprindle.wordpress.com. May I also direct your attention to my The Sonderman Constellation by R.E. Prindle published by iUniverse available through alibris, Amazon etc. I need some readers and sales too. I probably don’t need more than two sales to jump up to the 1,000.000th best selling. C’mon help a fellow out It’s a good book, you won’t regret it.
7/27/12 Update.
The Book
Here is corroboration for Catherine’s liaison with Mick Jagger. The following quote can be found on pp. 223-4 of the Tony Sanchez/John Blake memoir Up And Down With The Rolling Stones, 1979, John Blake Publishing (6.95) originally published as I Was Keith Richard’s Drug Dealer. Reprint 2010.
While I have no reason to doubt Catherine, corroboration is always a good thing. This corroborates both Mick and Eric Clapton. Quote:
Then along came Catherine. She was an exotic-looking Californian who’d enjoyed a brief affair with Eric Clapton. Eric introduced her to Mick at a party, and a couple hours later Catherine was tucked in Mick’s huge three-hundred-year-old bed in Cheyne Walk. The two of them stayed in bed for the next twenty-four hours, and after that, Catherine moved her things in.
Jan was piqued. She seemed to have fallen in love with Mick. Next to him other men lacked imagination and energy. I had seen other girls, even tough little groupies, entranced in much the same way, Jagger’s feminine qualities seem to give him an unusual insight into women, and he uses that insight to give him total power over them. But Jan said nothing- to do so whould be un-cool, and Mick hated uncoolness in women. Besides, she was a paid employee- no strings attached.
The friction between Jan and Catherine sent sparks flying almost every day. Jan hated Catherine because she had won Jagger’s body. Catherine hated Jan because she seemed to have captiviated Jagger’s mind. The situation was untenable, and when Mick was out, the girls would have bitter, screaming arguments. In his presence they attempted to feign sycophantic devotion. For Mick it was a perfect set-up. He had all the sex and company he wanted without involvement. Neither girl was secure enough to dare complain….
Mick loved to set them against each other until they were at the screaming point. It was as if he had become the person he pretended to be on stage, he needed his fans fighting over him, even in his living room. He was so egocentric now that he couldn’t love anyone except himself. He was emulating mad, debauched , oversexed Turner, the character he had played in Performance. With Marianne gone, Mick’s last link to earth was severed and his image swallowed him up. Michael Philip Jagger had ceased to exist. Now there was only Mick Jagger, Superstar, twenty-four hours a day.
The farce at Cheyne Walk couldn’t drag on forever. Mick’s cosy menage a trois came to a stormy close when he announced in August that the Stones were off on a tour of Europe and that Catherine would not be coming. “Sorry, darling.” he told her. “It’s a band rule, always has been, I don’t take my old lady on the road.”
…Catherine wept for days. She knew it was over. Jagger wanted her out of the house by the time he returned from the tour. All her dreams of being the next Marianne Faithfull were flying out the window. When the final explosion came she lashed out at Jagger, kicking, spitting, scratching and trying to tear his hair out by the roots. It was, of course, a very uncool thing to do. Catherine left quietly that night.
A slightly different version than Catherine’s which was ultra-cool.
By the way, disregard any negative criticism of this book. It is authentic. Sanchez was inside and his co-author, John Blake, was a very well informed, intelligent journalist from an outside perspective. Essential for Stones’ fans.
Update 8/11/12
Another version of Catherine’s stay with Mick comes from Christoper Andersen’s Mick, Gallery Books, 2012. Anderson does not give his sources.
(Mick) preferring instead to amuse himself by rotating among the members of his floating harem. Among them: Janice Kenner, a stunning blonde from LA, ostensibly hired to be a housekeeper cook and “personal assistant”; New Yorker Patti D’Arbanville, a nineteen-year-old model and actress; another leggy California, Catherine James and Brian’s ex-girlfriend Suki Poitier.
Even for these women, there were limits when it came to sharing Mick. When one girl came upon Catherine James in bed with Mick at Stargroves, he merely suggested a menage a trois. James, furious, stormed out. After hastily making love to the interloper, Jagger spent the rest of the evening trying to talk James out of catching the next flight home. He succeeded, but it wasn’t long before James decided she “definitely wasn’t the right girlfriend for Mick. “Eventually I would have killed him in his sleep. I’ve a jealous nature.”
A different version than that of either Catherine or Sanchez. Anderson goes on to provide corroboration for Catherine’s account in which she called Mick after Bianca moved in. This paragraph refers to the account of Miss Pamela but is nevertheless confirmatory:
Now ensconced with Mick at Stargroves, Bianca began cleaning house. One by one, she ordered the other women in Mick’s life to stay away from her man. When Miss Pamela called, she was surprised when a husky voiced woman answered the phone. “You are never, ever, under any circumstances to call Mick, ever again.” Bianca said. “Get the picture.”
So, we acquire richly varied accounts of Catherine and Mick.
Update 9/13/12
Ronnie Wood, Ronnie, 2007, St. Martin’s Press. This from Ronnie Wood page 69:
On the subject of women, on another Beck tour I fell for Kathy James, who is famous in rock and roll mythology because she was the original groupie. And absolutely gorgeous woman, believe me, she had a special feel for special musicians.
Update 10/4/12
Philip Norman: Mick Jagger, Harper Collins, 2012 pp, 402, 405
For a time, just like Performance’s Turner, he had two live-in female companions, albeit in this case both Californian rather than French and polyglot Danish. The first to be installed, a bubble-haired blonde named Janice Kenner, had found herself alone with Mick in the back of his car and received a well-tried Jagger line: “Do you like waking up in the city or the country?” Replying “the country,” she had been spirited away to Stargroves, there acquitting herself well enough to be asked to wake up in the city with him as well. Soon afterward, he also brought home Catherine James, a solemn-looking twenty-two-year-old who had taken the same roundabout car ride via Berkshire. The two coexisted in Cheyne Walk without rancor, each fixing on a distinct role for herself” Catherine was Mick’s girlfriend while Janice was his cook, but available for the occasional “romp.” In fact, their easy relationship rather irked Mick, who preferred the women around him to be at loggerheads for his attention. One day, to their bemusement, he got them to plaster each other with strawberries and whipped cream like a polite English garden-party version of mud wrestling.
As further proof of his rather lonely state, he also asked “Miss Pamela” on the tour (she decided to return to her boyfriend, however) and took along one of Cheyne Walk’s two resident houris, his “cook” Janice Kenner. The other, Catherine James, was dismissed as she lay in bed, with a farewell kiss and instructions to lock up the house before returning home to California.
Update 1/22/13
From Scaduto, Tony: Mick Jagger, Everybody’s Lucifer, David McKay Company, Inc., 1974. pp. 348, 349, 350.
Eventually, however, Catherine came along- introduced to Jagger by Eric Clapton- and she moved in, a replacement for Marianne in a way. Catherine is a Californian, outstandingly beautiful, but Janice didn’t think she was especially sophisticated. Catherine is a super-groupie, the elite of the groupies: Instead of flying on her own to meet a superstar, the superstars send her plane tickets so she won’t forget to come to them. Jagger impressed on Catherine the fact that she was living in a grand house, had a lot of money to spend on it, and must learn to be a real English lady, Janice recalls. But Catherine seemed to have no idea how to be a lady: she took to flickering her cigarette ashes on the floor because there was someone around to clean them up, Janice felt. Catherine appeared to be trying to play the role Jagger was forcing on her, telling Janice it was all so romantic to be Mick Jagger’s lady and how madly in love she was with him. And Janice thought: Mick’s not in love with you, he’s just interested in fucking you and having a good time. He’s fucking around with your head, and you’re going to be terribly hurt when you wake up. Jagger’s games made Janice angry, and she tried to warn Catherine about it, gently. Catherine refused to permit reality to get in the way of romantic dreams, Janice felt, and the two women started getting into arguments over it. Janice later said: “Mick knew it and loved it. he played it up and instigated arguments between us. I remember thinking: “The guy is fantasizing that we’re fighting over him.”
The Stones were going off on tour again- a month in Europe through September and part of October. Catherine appeared furious because she was being left behind, and even Janice was being taken along, a last minute assignment to help Anita take care of her baby because Shirley Arnold had sprained her ankle and couldn’t go. They were up in Jagger’s bedroom, packing his clothes for the tour. Catherine sat on the bed crying that she was being left behind, and Jagger seemed to be feeling sorry for her. He leaned over and stroked her hair very lightly. “Let’s go downstairs to the other bedroom,” he said. Turning to Janice: “Finish packing this shit.” They left the room, and Janice sat on the bed, lit up a huge joint, and thought: He’s giving her a farewell fuck. She sat there a long while, smoking, getting too stoned to finish packing. And she thought: I’m really glad he took her downstairs because it’ll make her feel a lot better; she’s done nothing but cry for days.
Suddenly, Jagger came rushing back into the bedroom, shouting: “I don’t understand her,” followed by a tall, willowy and very exotic woman, a friend who had dropped in to visit. She also shouts: “I don’t understand.” Catherine rushes in, screaming: “I hate you, I hate you.” And Janice, stoned, sits there thinking: It’s like a fucking movie comedy. When everyone quiets down, and the woman goes home, and Jagger leaves the room for moment, Catherine explains what the commotion was all about:
“We’re in bed, fucking.” she tells Janice, when in walks this bitch and makes some remark, and Mick invites her to get in bed with us. I guess I just got hysterical and I started screaming and kicking Mick and scratching. My last night in bed with Mick, and he wants another chick to join us.”
Update 3/29/13
Hodkinson, Mark: Marianne Faithfull, As Tears Go By, 1991, Omnibus Press
p. 136
On his visits to England, Jagger began sleeping with a succession of girls, and Stargroves, the grandiose emblem for Jagger and Marianne’s love, became the setting of his numerous one night stands. He had a longer romance with Suki Potier, a former girlfriend of Brian Jones, and spent several weeks in the company of a Californian girl called Catherine James.
Update 4/21/14
Eric Clapton: The Autobiography, 2007, Broadway Books
On the first day, while I was sitting in the theater during rehearsals, watching the various acts do their turn, a very beautiful blond girl came and sat next to me. We struck up a conversation, and at some point she asked if I would like to stay with her while I was in town. She was gorgeous, and seeming to sense my shyness with women, did her best to put me at ease. Her name was Kathy, and she took care of me the whole time I was in New York.
She had her own apartment, and I moved in with her. She showed me around, taking me to the various places where I could tick off the list of things I wanted to experience. I remember her taking me to various coffee bars in the Village, and we went to one or two music stores, like Manny’s on Forty-eight Street She also took me to a big saddler’s called Kaufman’s which sold western gear, where I bought my first cowboy boots, and with this beautiful girl on my arm, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
A Review: Peter Ibbetson by George Du Maurier
May 8, 2009
A Review
The Novels Of George Du Maurier
Peter Ibbetson, Trilby, The Martian
Part IV
Peter Ibbetson
Singers and Dancers and Fine Romancers
What do they know?
What do they know?
-Larry Hosford
Review by R.E. Prindle
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II Review of Trilby
III. Review of The Martian
IV. Review of Peter Ibbetson
Peter Ibbetson is the first of the three novels of George Du Maurier. As elements of the later two novels are contained in embryo in Ibbetson it would seem that Du Maurier had the three novels at least crudely plotted while a fourth dealing with politics but never realized is hinted at. Actually Du Maurier has Ibbetson who writes this ‘autobiography’ write several world changing novels from inside the insane asylum to which he had been committed. In the Martian Barty Josselin wrote several world changing books while ‘possessed’ by an alien intelligence, in a way, not too dissimilar to the situation of Ibbetson. Du Maurier himself comes across, as I have said, as either a half demented lunatic or a stone genius.
He has Ibbetson and the heroine, The Duchess of Towers write in code while they read encrypted books. Du Maurier says that Ibbetson and hence the two following books deal with weighty subjects but in a coded manner that requires attention to understand.
On page 362 of the Modern Library edition he says:
…but more expecially in order to impress you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and somewhat minatory utterance (that may haunt your fever sense during your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my best, my very best to couch it in the obscurest and most unitelligible phraseology, I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense, mere common-sense- it is the fault of my half French and wholly imperfect education.
So, as Bob Dylan said of the audiences of his Christian tour: Those who were meant to get it, got it, for all others the story is merely a pretty story or perhaps fairy tale. The fairy tale motif is prominent in the form of the fee Tarapatapoum and Prince Charming of the story. Mary, the Duchess of Towers is Tarapatapoum and Peter is Prince Charming. It might be appropriate here to mention that Du Maurier was highly influenced by Charles Nodier the teller of fairy tales of the Romantic period. Interestingly Nodier wrote a story called Trilby. Du Maurier borrowed the name for his novel Trilby while he took the name Little Billee from a poem by Thackeray. A little background that makes that story a little more intelligible.
Those that watch for certain phobias such as anti-Semitism and Eugenics will find this story of Du Maurier’s spolied for them as was Trilby and probably The Martian. One is forced to concede that Du Maurier deals with those problems in a coded way. Whether his meaning is derogatory or not lies with your perception of the problems not with his.
Thus on page 361 just above the previous quote Du Maurier steps from concealment to deliver a fairly open mention of Eugenics. After warning those with qualities and attributes to perpetuate those qualities by marrying wisely, i.e. eugenically, he breaks out with this:
Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall clubfooted retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at every turn.
Here we have a premonition of Lothrop Stoddards Overman and Underman. The best multiply slowly while the worst rear large families. Why anyone would find fault with the natural inclination to marry well if one’s handsome and intelligent with a similar person is beyond me. Not only is this natural it has little to do with the Eugenics Movement. Where Eugenics falls foul, and rightly so, is in the laws passed to castrate those someone/whoever deemed unworthy to reproduce. This is where the fault of the Eugenics Movement lies. Who is worthy to pass such judgment? Certainly there are obvious cases where neutering would be appropriate and beneficial for society but in my home town, for instance, no different than yours I’m sure, the elite given the opportunity would have had people neutered out of enmity and vindictiveness. that is where the danger lies. There is nothing wrong with handsome and intelligent marrying handsome and intelligent. How may people want a stupid, ugly partner?
Du Maurier had other opinions that have proved more dangerous to society. One was his belief in the virtues of Bohemians, that is say, singers and dancers and fine romancers. On page 284 he says:
There is another society in London and elsewhere, a freemasonry of intellect and culture and hard work- la haute Ashene du talent- men and women whose names are or ought to be household words all over the world; many of them are good friends of ine, both here and abroad; and that society, which was good enough for my mother and father, is quite good enough for me.
Of course, the upper Bohemia of proven talent. But still singers and dancers and fine romancers. And what do they know? Trilby was of the upper Bohemia as was Svengali but Trilby was hypnotized and Svengali but a talented criminal. What can a painter contribute but a pretty picture, what can a singer do but sing his song, I can’t think of the dancing Isadora Duncan or the woman without breaking into laughter. And as for fine romancers, what evil hath Jack Kerouac wrought.
I passed part of my younger years in Bohemia, Beat or Hippie circles, and sincerely regret that Bohemian attitudes have been accepted as the norm for society. Bohemia is fine for Bohemians but fatal for society which requires more discipline and stability. Singers and dancers and fine romancers, wonderful people in their own way, but not builders of empires.
In that sense, the promotion of Bohemianism, Du Maurier was subversive.
But the rules of romancing are in the romance and we’re talking about Du Maurier’s romance of Peter Ibbetson.
Many of the reasons for criticizing Du Maurier are political. The man whether opposed to C0mmunist doctrine or not adimired the Bourgeois State. He admired Louis-Philippe as the Beourgeois king of France. This may sound odd as he also considered himself a Bohemian but then Bohemians are called into existence by a reaction to the Bourgeoisie. Perhaps not so odd. He was able to reconcile such contradictions. Indeed he is accused of having a split personality although I think this is false. Having grown up in both France and England he developed a dual national identity and his problem seems to be reconciling his French identity with his English identity thus his concentration on memory.
In this novel he carefully builds up a set of sacred memories of his childhood. He very carefully introduces us to the people of his childhood. Mimsy Seraskier his little childhood sweetheart. All the sights and sounds and smells. In light of the quote I used telling how he disguises his deeper meaning one has to believe that he is giving us serious theories he has worked out from science and philosophy.
Having recreated his French life for us Peter’s parents die and Ibbetson’s Uncle Ibbetson from England adopts him and takes him back to the Sceptered Isle. Thus he ceases to be the French child Pasquier and becomes the English child Peter Ibbetson. A rather clean and complete break. From this point on his childhood expectations are disappointed with the usual psychological results. He develops a depressed psychology. The cultural displacement prevents him from making friends easily or at all. His Uncle who has a difficult boorish personality is unable to relate to a sensitive boy with a Bohemian artistic temperament. Hence he constantly demeans the boy for not being like himself and has no use for him.
This is all very skillfully handled. We have intimations that bode no good for Peter. The spectre is prison. The hint of a crime enters into the story without anything actually being said. But the sense of foreboding enters Peter’s mind and hence the reader’s. This is done extremely well. It’s a shame the Communists are in control of the media so that they can successfully denigrate any work of art that contradicts or ignores their beliefs. For instance the term bourgeois itself. The word is used universally as a contemptuous epithet even though the Bourgeois State was one of the finest created. Why then contempt? Simply because the Communists must destroy or denigrate any success that they canot hope to surpass. I was raised believing that what was Bourgeois was contemptible without ever knowing what Bourgeois actually meant. It is only through Du Maurier at this late stage in life that I begin to realize what the argument really was and how I came to accept the Communist characterization. I’m ashamed of myself.
Hence all Du Maurier criticism is unjust being simply because it is the antithesis of Communist beliefs. The man as a writer is very skillful, as I have said, a genius. If I were read these novels another couple of times who knows what riches might float up from the pages.
Colonel Ibbetson apprentices Peter to an architect, a Mr Lintot, which, while not unhappy, is well below Peter’s expectations for his fairy Prince Charming self. As a lowly architect he is placed in a position of designing huts for the workers of the very wealthy. The contrast depresses him even further. He has been disappointed in love and friendship and then he is compelled by business exigencies to attend a ball given by a wealthy client. He definitely feels out of place. Psychologically incapable of mixing he stands in a corner.
At this ball the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, The Duchess of Towers, is in attendance. From across the room she seems to give him an interested glance. Peter can only hope, hopelessly. As a reader we have an intimation that something will happen but we can’t be sure how. I couldn’t see. Then he sees her in her carriage parading Rotten Row in Hyde Park. She sees him and once again it seems that she gives him a questioning look.
Then he takes a vacation in France where he encounter her again. After talking for a while he discovers that she is a grown up Mimsey Seraskier, his childhood sweetheart. Thus his French childhood and English adulthood are reunited in her. Wow! There was a surprise the reader should have seen coming. I didn’t. I had no trouble recognizing her from childhood in France but Du Maurier has handled this so skillfully that I am as surprised as was Peter. I tipped my imaginary hat to Du Maurier here.
Perhaps I entered into Du Maurier’s dream world here but now I began to have flashbacks, a notion that I had read this long ago, most likely in high school or some other phantasy existence. I can’t shake the notion but I can’t remember reading the book then at all. Don’t know where I might have come across it. Of course that doesn’t mean an awful lot. If asked if I had ever read a Charles King novel I would have said no but when George McWhorter loaned me a couple to read that he had in Louisville I realized I had read one of them before. Eighth grade. I could put a handle on that but not Peter Ibbetson. Perhaps Du Marurier has hypnotized me. Anyway certain images seem to stick in my mind from a distant past.
It was at this time that Mary, the Duchess if Towers, formerly Mimsy, enters Peter’s dream, in an actual real life way. This is all well done, Peter dreamt he was walking toward an arch when two gnomish people tried to herd him into prison. Mary appears and orders the gnomes to vanish which they do. ‘That’s how you have to handle that.’ She says. And that is very good advice for dreams that Du Maurier gives. As we’ll see Du Maurier has some pretensions to be a psychologist.
She then instructs Peter in the process of ‘dreaming true.’ In such a manner they can actually be together for real in a shared dream. Now, Trilby, while seemingly frivolous, actually displays a good knowledge of hypnotism. More than that it puts Du Maurier in the van of certain psychological knowledge. Hypnotism and psychology go together. Without an understanding of hypnotism one can’t be a good psychologist. If he wasn’t ahead of Freud at this time he was certainly even with him. Remember this is 1891 while Freud didnt’ surface until 1895 and then few would have learned of him. He wrote in German anyway.
Freud was never too developed on auto-suggestion. Emile Coue is usually attributed to be the originator of auto-suggestion yet the technique that Mary gives to Peter is the exact idea of auto-suggestion that Coue is said to have developed twenty or twenty-five years on.
Du Maurier speaks of the sub-conscious which is more correct than the unconscious. He misunderstands the nature of the subconscious giving it almost divine powers but in many ways he is ahead of the game. Now, Ibbetson was published in 1891 which means that Du Maurier was in possession of his knowledge no later than say 1889 while working on it from perhaps 1880 or so on. It will be remembered that Lou Sweetser, Edgar Rice Burroughs mentor in Idaho, was also knowledgable in psychology in 1891 but having just graduated a couple of years earlier from Yale. So Freud is very probably given too much credit for originating what was actually going around. This earlier development of which Du Maurier was part has either been suppressed in Freud’s favor or has been passed over by all psychological historians.
So, Mary gives Peter psychologically accurate information on auto-suggestion so that he can ‘dream true.’ I don’t mean to say that anyone can share another’s dreams which is just about a step too far but by auto-suggestion one can direct and control one’s dreams. Auto-suggestion goes way back anyway. The Poimandre of Hermes c. 300 AD is an actual course in auto-suggestion.
Peter is becoming more mentally disturbed now that his denied expectations have returned to haunt him in the person of Tarapatapoum/Mimsey/Mary. Once again this is masterfully done. The clouding of his mind is almost visible. Over the years he has generated a deep seated hatred for Colonel Ibbetson even though the Colonel, given his lights, has done relatively well by him. Much of Peter’s discontent is internally generated by his disappointed expectations. The Colonel has hinted that he might be Peter’s father rather than his Uncle. This completely outrages Peter’s cherished understanding of his mother and father. The Colonel according to Peter was one of those guys who claimed to have made every woman he’d ever met. One must bear in mind that Peter is telling the story while the reader is seeing him become increasingly unstable.
While Peter doesn’t admit it to himself he confronts the Colonel with the intention of murdering him. He claims self-defense but the court doesn’t believe it nor does the reader. It’s quite clear the guy was psycho but, once again, Du Maurier handles this so skillfully that one still wonders. Given the death penalty his friends and supporters, the influential Duchess of Towers, get the sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
Then begins Peter’s double life in prison that goes on for twenty years. By day a convict, at night Peter projects hemself into a luxurious dream existence with his love, Mary, the Duchess of Towers. Quite insane but he has now realized his expections if only in fantasy. Now, this novel as well as Du Maurier’s other novels is textually rich. The style is dense while as Du Maurier tells us it is written in more than one key, has encoded messages, so I’m concentrating on only the main thread here. That concerns memory.
While it is possible to subconsciously manage one’s dreams, I do it to a minor extent, of course it is impossible for two people to dream toether and share that dream. This is to venture into the supernatural. Spiritualism and Theosophy both dealing with the supernatural as does all religion including Christianity, were at their peak at this time. Du Maurier has obviously studied them. Just because one utilizes one’s knowledge in certain ways to tell a story doesn’t mean one believes what one writes. Ibbetson is written so well that the writer seems to have fused himself with the character. If I say Du Maurier believes that may not be true but as the same themes are carried through all his novels without a demurrer it seems likely.
Du Maurier seems to be pleading a certain understanding of the subconscious giving it as many or more supernatural powers as Freud himself will later. This might be the appropriate place to speculate on Du Maurier’s influence on Mark Twain. We know Twain was an influence on Burroughs so perhaps both were.
Before he died Twain wrote a book titled the Mysterious Stranger. This was twenty-five years after Peter Ibbetson. Operator 44, the Mysterious Stranger, is a time time traveler who has some sort of backstair connecting years as a sort of memory monitor. Peter and Mary over the years work out a system that allows them to travel back through times even to prehistoric times. Thus Peter is able to sketch from life stone age man hunting mastodons, or Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. They are present at these events but as sort of ghost presences without substance. they have no substance hence cannot affect reality.
This would be a major them in fifties science fiction in which, for instance, a time traveler steps on a grub, then comes back to his present time finding everyone talking a different language. Change one item and you change all others. Du Maurier avoids this problem that he very likely thought of in this clever way.
We can clearly see the future of twentieth century imaginiative writing taking form here. One can probably trace several twentieth century sci-fi themes back to Du Maurier.
Peter and Mary have a magic window through they can call up any scene within their memories. In their dream existence they are dependent on memory they can only re-experience, they cannot generate new experiences. The memory extends back genetically although Du Maurier speaks in terms of reincarnation. Peter hears Mary humming a tune he has never heard before. Mary explains that the tune is a family melody written by an ancestress hundreds of years before. Thus one has this genetic memory persisting through generations. This gives Du Maurier room to expatiate on the persistence of memory through past, present and future.
Du Maurier has worked out an elaborate scheme in which memory unites past, present and future, into a form of immortality. This is actually a religious concept but a very beautiful concept, very attractive in its way.
Peter and Mary had elected to stay at one age- twenty-six to twenty-eight- so for twenty years they retained their youthful form and beauty. Then one night Peter enters the mansion of his dreams through a lumber room to find the way blocked. He knows immediately that Mary has died. He then learns that in attempting to save a child from a train she was herself killed.
Peter goes into an insane rage attacking the prison guards while calling each Colonel Ibbetson. Clearly insane and that’s where the send him. The mad house. Originally he continues to rage so they put him in a straight jacket where he remains until his mind calms enough to allow him to dream. In his dream he returns to a stream in France. Here he believes he can commit suicide in his dream which should be shock enough to stop his heart in real life. Something worth thinking about. Filling his pockets with stones he means to walk in over his head. Then, just ahead he spies the back of a woman sitting on a log. Who else but Mary. She has done what has never been done before, what even Houdini hasn’t been able to do, make it to back to this side.
Now outside their mansion, they are no longer young, but show their age. This is nicely done stuff. Of course I can’t replicate the atmosphere and feel but the Du Maurier feeling is ethereal. As I say I thought he was talking to me and I entered his fantasy without reserve.
Here’s a lot of chat about the happiness on the otherside. When Peter awakes back in the asylum he is calm and sane. He convinces the doctors and is restored to full inmate rights. Once himself again he begins to write those wonderful books that right the world.
One gets the impression that Du Maurier believes he himself is writing those immortal books that will change the world. Time and fashions change. Today he is thought a semi-evil anti- Semite, right wing Bourgeois writer. I don’t know if he’s banned from college reading lists but I’m sure his works are not used in the curriculum. I think he’s probably considered oneof those Dead White Men. Thus a great writer becomes irrelevant.
It’s a pity because from Peter Ibbetson through Trilby to The Martian he has a lot to offer. The Three States of Mind he records are thrilling in themselves, as Burroughs would say, as pure entertainment while on a more thoughtful read there is plenty of nourishment. Taken to another level his psychology is very penetrating. His thought is part of the mind of the times. Rider Haggard shares some of the mystical qualities. The World’s Desire is comparable which can be complemented by his Heart Of The World. The latter may turn out to be prophetic shortly. H.G. Wells’ In The Days Of The Comet fits into this genre also. Another very good book. Of course Burroughs’ The Eternal Lover and Kipling and Haggard’s collaboration of Love Eternal. Kipling’s Finest Story In The World might also fit in as well, I’m sure there are many others of the period of which I’m not aware. I haven’t read Marie Corelli but she is often mentioned in this context. You can actually slip Conan Doyle in their also.
Well, heck, you can slip the whole Wold Newton Universe, French and Farmerian in there. While there is small chance any Wold Newton meteor had anything to do with it yet as Farmer notes at about that time a style of writing arose concerned with a certain outlook that was worked by many writers each contributing his bit while feeding off the others as time went by.
I don’t know that Du Maurier is included in the Wold Newton Universe (actually I know he isn’t) but he should be. He was as influential on the group as any other or more so. He originated many of the themes.
Was Burroughs influenced by him? I think so. There was no way ERB could have missed Trilby. No possible way. If he read Trilby and the other two only once which is probable any influence was probably subliminable. ERB was not of the opinion that a book could change the world, so he disguised his more serious thoughts just as Du Maurier did his. He liked to talk about things though.
Singers and dancers. What do they know? What do they know? In the end does it really matter what they know. Time moves on, generations change, as they change the same ideas come around expressed in a different manner. They have their day then are replaced. The footprint in the concrete does remain. Genius will out.
I, Dynamo 