A Review

The Low Brow And The High Brow

An In Depth Study Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’

The Mucker And Marcia Of The Door Step

Part III

by

R.E. Prindle

Background Of the Second Decade Social And Political

 

     1.

     I have been criticized for discussing material that seems to bear no relationship to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  The social milieu in which a man lives and works directly affect what and how he writes.  He will react within that milieu whether he can understand and articulate it or not.

     ERB understood much.  He understood the main conflict of his times- that between the Religious and Scientific Consciousnesses.  How he understood it is one thing, its exact nature is another.  The battle was not necessarily put into the terms of science versus religion.  On the objective level science had more prestige while on the subjective level religion had the upper hand creating a dualistic conflict.  As Voltaire said:  No one ever willed himself an athiest.  The same can said of Science.  The usual terms employed in the conflict was that of  spirtiualism versus materialism.  So those two words were supercharged masking the real conflict.

     While religion retained great strength in this period science was so strong that religions had to adapt to science, thus one had the ecumenical Congress Of Religions in Chicago in 1893 during which a common plan of resistance was discussed.

     One reaction to Science was American Liberalism.  Liberalism is in fact a religion founded on beliefs rather than facts.  American Liberalism developed out of the Puritan faith of New England.  The Puritans believed themselves  to be the successor of the Hebrews of the Old Testament as the Chosen People of God.

     Two very interesting studies have appeared in the last couple decades which illuminate the English background of the United States.  One is David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed; the other is Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins Wars.  Both illustrate the continuity of behavior of the colonists between England and the Colonies.  That continuity began with the Norman invasion of England in 1066 and continues through the strange Liberal mentality of today.  Burroughs who was of the ‘Conservative’ mentality had to struggle with the forces of Liberalism in his day.

     When the Normans invaded England they enslaved the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants.  Anyone who has read Ivanhoe by Walter Scott has the image of Gurth with his iron colar inscribed on his memory.  This piece of arrogance was to have serious consequences in both England and America.

     The Normans occupied the Southern counties of England which Thomas Hardy caled Wessex, while the brunt of slavery fell on the East Anglian counties.  The insult of slavery was burned into East Anglian memories along with a desire for revenge made more savage by the the religious certitude that they were the Chosen People of God.

     The East Anglians, of course, revolted against the Norman Church Of England, emigrating to North America where they settled in the States of New England.  New England = New Anglia.  In England they fought the English Civil War against the Normans.  Puritan Roundheads against Norman Cavaliers.  It then became the turn of the defeated Cavaliers to emigrate to North America.  They chose to go to Virginia where they gave the colony its Norman Cavalier character and nickname.  The ancient enemies were now divided North and South.

     As Fischer points out, slavery by the Norman descendents in England had disappeared only about a hundred years before the English Civil War.  The Cavaliers now revived slavery in their Southern colonies.  First they brought indentured servants from England who were slaves subject to the whims of their masters for a stated period of years that could easily be extended.  Then African slavery was introduced.  For a period of time both White and Black slaves worked side by side in the fields with the Blacks gradually displacing the Whites.

     The New Englanders looked with fear and loathing on the Norman Virginians, who as they saw it, now resumed their old habits.  It was here that the American Civil War was conceived.  The Puritan New Englanders after having first rejected the king in the American Revolution which their East Anglian forebearers  had failed to do in England then turned to agitating a war against the Norman Cavaliers of the South, whose ancestors had enslaved them, on the basis of an anti-slavery abolitionist program.

     Just as they had succeeded against the Crown where their forebearers had failed they succeeded in absolutely crushing the descendents of the Normans.  This punishment of the Cavaliers was the most severe of any since 1066.  Thus subsequent US history with its notion of unconditional surrender was formed.  This was a vicious attitude formed from the same feeling of defeat.

     To return to the East Anglians in England to explain the American Liberal mindset.  Shortly after printed books became readily available  the East Anglians bought Bibles adopting the Old Testament notion of the Chosen People by substituting themselves for the Hebrew Children.  A British Israelite group formed calling the English people the new Chosen People.  Indeed, the British throne is believed to be in lineal descent from that of King David of Old Israel.

     Thus there were at least three Chosen Peoples in existence from the fifteenth century on- Jews, the English and the Puritan New Englanders.  New England became Greater New England as the Puritans multiplied spreading across the Northern tier of States.

     A psychological characteristic of Chosen Peoples is that they upload their needs and wishes to an imaginary god in the sky then download the same needs and wishes back to themselves as the Will Of God.  Thus they say not my will but they will be done, O Lord.  The faithful thus become justified sinners.  Any criminal act can be justified as the Will of God which it is the duty of the faithful to perform  This also creates a double standard because what is right for themselves in the eyes of the Lord is forbidden to others.  The children of Israel can exterminate other peoples with impunity, but it is wrong for other peoples to even defend themselves against the children of the Lord.  Serious stuff.

     These ends and desires are accepted then as a messianic or utopian goal.  It is the duty of the Chosen People to impose God’s Will on the rest of the world.  To resist that Will is evil making the non-believer a dastard, a heretic, an infidel, an anti-Semite or whatever.

     In the United States the Will of the god of the Puritans was transformed into Manifest Destiny, which in turn metamorphosed into the triumph of Democracy as defined by the Chosen People of America, who in turn metamorphosed from Puritans into Liberals.

     As a chosen people and as a result of the Civil War the Liberals identified with the victims who needed their help.  Thus the Civil War was fought in their minds by a virtuous people acting out the Will of God to rescue unfortunate victims from a malevolent White minority.  In the case of the Civil War it was the Negro slaves.  As the century and Liberalism developed the umbrella of help was extended to all the ‘enslaved’ or colonial peoples of Europe which is to say all the colored peoples of the world.  It was not enough that injustice as perceived by the Liberals should be corrected, but that the perpetrators should be condignly and brutally punished unconditionally in the name of and by the Will of their God, which is to say the projected desires and wishes of a self-appointed Chosen People.

     Utopian literature which flourished after the Civil War is the direct result of this Messianic fervor.  Utopian literature abounds in England, Greater New England and with the jews.

     Having then succeeded in crushing the Cavaliers of the South the Liberals attempted to demean, belittle and abuse the White South in the most draconian manner.  The period of Reconstruction is the blackest hour in American history.  The Whites were stripped of civil rights having the Negroes placed over them as masters.  The Whites, so far as possible, were expropriated of all property through taxation when not stolen outright.  The Whites, of course, reacted by forming the first Ku Klux Klan to protect their lives and interests.   Reconstruction lasted until 1877 well nigh into the twentieth century.  The South was impoverished and set back for at least a century and may still be recovering today if such is possible under the present Liberal regime.

     All factual references to Reconstruction have been obscured by references to the KKK but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries memories of Liberal crimes in the South were fresh and bleeding wounds.  As is well known Jim Crow was the inevitable result of the attempt to crush and bury the White South.

     As the nineteenth century progressed and utopian literature flourished the Puritans, now Liberals, identified with all the ‘oppressed’ which is to say colored peoples of the world against the European conquerors.  Everywhere America sided with the natives against Europeans.  In a feeling of total frustration Charles De Gaulle would remark:  America is a White country, but it acts like a colored country.

     At about mid-nineteenth century Jewish utopian messianists under the direction of Karl Marx formed the Communist Party.  Thus Jewish utopian messianism spread from England- Marx was based in London- throughout Europe to the world.  As Communism also opposed Western colonialism, although not Communist colonialism, these two powerful agencies worked to upset the Western hegemony of the world.  As someone will always have hegemony of the world what appears on the surface as ‘justice’ is merely the transfer of power to another agency and hence new ‘injustice.’  As of this writing it appears that the beneficiary of American and Communist efforts will be the Chinese.  This shift has already happened but has not yet been officially acknowledged.  Thus the result of the Liberal and Communist quest for ‘social justice’ will be merely to place Europe and America’s neck under a Chinese yoke rather than the other way around.  Obviously the Chinese god is not the same as the Utopian God.

     During the period of Reconstruction as the Liberals were punishing the Southern Whites and rewarding the Negroes immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe began in earnest.  While the Irish and Germans had created their own set of problems yet culturally they were close enough to the original Anglo-Saxon colonists to be, after a fashion, readily assimilated.

     But with the congeries of nationalities from East and Southern Europe came many and diverse customs and languages.  Assimilating them into Anglo-Celtic-Teutonic America was not so easy.  Thus groups of Americans resisting immigration arose.  The Know Nothings fought the Irish but this was different.

     The Liberals could then pathologize the anti-immigration people as ‘nativists’, later White Supremacists and other derogatory terms.  They could afirm their own virtue against these people as they had against the Southern Whites.  When the power base of restrictionists took form in the South as the second Ku Klux Klan this only served to show the perfidy of Southern Whites in a new shade.

     The Liberals then allied themselves not only with the interests of Negroes but with the immigrants to form the Liberal Coalition which was to dominate American society from the Second Decade to the present.

     Already British and Puritan utopianists, they were now joined by the Jews who from 1870 to 1914 represented the largest nationality of immigrants.  Both the Liberals and the Jews were Bible based.  Liberals considered Jews as the successors to the Biblical Hebrews if not Hebrews themselves.  While Roman Catholics distanced themselves from Hebrewism the Protestant sects derived directly from the Old Testament considered themselves neo-Hebrews so they were quite willing to defer to what they considered paleo-Hebrews.  Thus the two versions of utopianism were joined.  Both forms of Hebrewism accepted anti-Semitism as the greatest vice.  The foregoing discussion has been a good account of what Semitism is:  that is a belief in one’s own divinely appointed role as the arbiter of the world’s fate.

     So far as I know neithr Semitism or anti-Semitism have ever been adequately defined so for the purposes of this paper anti-Semitism will be defined quite simply as the denial of the Semitist’s self-appointed role as the agent of God on earth.

     As one of a Scientific Consciousness  such a denial seems hardly necessary but as most people are of a Religious Consciousness there it stands.

     Needless to say Burroughs was of the Scientific Consciousness therefore per force an anti-Semitist although he would never have understood his position in those terms.

     As can be seen Judeo/Liberal/Utopianism is a religious matter that will defy reason.  It is a matter dependent upon a subjective, spiritual belief system.  It is beyond the reach of logic.  Never argue with them.  The adherents cannot be argued with, they must humored.  Reigions are revealed not thought out.

2.

     The nineteenth century also saw the rise of Science which is an objective materialistic sysem, conscious not subconscious, based on facts and reality.  It doesn’t take a genius to spot that the religious systems and the scientific systems are incompatible; one must subordinate or destroy the other.  Now, seriously folks, this is war to the knife.

     Knowledge is hard won and built up slowly while revealed religion is complete and entire at conception.  While the former is subject to trial and error the latter is seemingly pat- it is God’s own Word.

     As Freud pointed out the religious consciousness received three main blows.  The first was that the Universe was heliocentric rather than terracentric; the third was the malleable construction of the human mind as defined by psychoanalysis.  These two could be religiously managed; nothing had been revealed that couldn’t be manipulated to religion’s use.  The middle blow could not.  That was the concept of Evolution as enunciated by Charles Darwin.  Thus it was clear except to the most entrenched religionist that the world was not created by God in 4004 BC as Bishop Ussher stated but evolved beginning somewhat over four billion years ago.  There’s an incompatibility there that cannot be swept under the carpet or even ignored.

     Make no mistake: science and religion are at odds in the struggle for the human mind.  Writing in 1829 the incomparable Edgar Allen Poe expressed the problem in his brilliant poem:

Sonnet – To Science

Science! true daughteer of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Who preyest thus on this poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

     How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Has thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

     In addition to driving the Hamadryad from the wood, science also pulled God down from the heavens and exposed the fraud.  Freud showed God to be merely a projection of human desires.   How could religion counter the claims of Science?

     I do not single out any specific religion whether Christian, Jewish, Moslem or whatever.  All religions evolved in human consciousness and represent a phase of development in that evolution.  A phase of evolution but not its end.  Dig it!

     It then became necessary for religionists to absolutely deny Evolution.  In their favor was the fact that Darwin not merely but only enunciated the concept, but had no infallible proofs of the process.  Thus relgionists could say silly things like:  Do you really believe human being, you, actually descended from an ape? and be fairly convincing.  Most people were ashamed of such an ancestry.  Nobody asked the monkeys how they felt about the comparison.

     Inherent in Evolution is the idea of speciation.  Thus every time a species evolved there was a chance that it was an improvement on previous manifestations.  Between the Chimp and Homo Sapiens I are innumberable steps which have since disappeared.  If that were true then religious concepts which insisted that God created Man whole and entire without evolving were false.  If Creation was false than Religion was false.  There were many who empowered by the concept of Evolution and reasoning from appearances made the claim that was called ‘race’ rather than species.  The genetic differences between the ‘races’ were not yet clear.

     Until fairly recent times and the rise of genetics there was no infallible evidence to indicate speciation.  Today there is.  From 1859 when Darwin enunciated Evolution through the period under examination here, the second decade of the twentieth century, anyone asserting speciation could be ridiculed and destroyed as a bigot by the religionist.  Evolution itself was attacked and undermined in the thirties by the Boasian school of Anthropology which is still vital today.  (See Kevin MacDonald, The Culture Of Critique, 1998, 2002).

     In this period the Evolutionist was in a minority position.  Thus when Burroughs came down so strongly on the side of Evolution in his Tarzan series it is very surprising he created no uproar and there is no evidence the series was noticed on that account.

     It appears that Burroughs took the broad approach to these social problems.  He could see both sides of the issue deciding on the merits of the case rather than the ideology of the situation.  As has been noted he was quite capable of changing his mind on vital issues when presented with convincing evidence, i.e. life on Mars.  He was a true scientist.

3.

      Perhaps around 1910 it began to dawn on a significant number or people for the first time that unlimited and unrestricted immigration was causing unexpected and irreversible changes in the social fabric.  The war on Anglo-Saxon ideals, institutions and customs was well underway.  Such reactions had been a recurring feature of American society but now there was no West to escape to.   In addition industry had reshaped the cities.  Farm machinery was reshaping farming practices reducing the need for farmhands so that country boys migrated to the cities. By mid-decade for the first time more people lived in the cities than on the land.

     These changes were unwelcome and uncomfortable to a lot of people creating a malaise.  Those who viewed Reconstruction for the horror it was as well as those who considered themselves Old Stock were pathologized by the Liberals but their views found expression in books and articles but usually on the defensive side as with Jack London’s Valley Of The Moon and not on the aggressive side which would be visited by condign punishment as heresy.

     If one mentioned immigrants at all it was possible to discuss only positive attributes.  The Liberal turned a blind eye to the aggression of home countries preferring to see these home places too as victims who needed their protection.  As Chosen People the Liberal sees himself as naturally superior to the ‘victims’ but does not perceive his supposed superiority as ‘racism.’

     An honest and well meaning writer like Homer Lea who had actually been in the Orient and learned of Japanese plans first hand was pathologized and dismissed as a crank although his prognostications were based in fact as Pearl Harbor was to show.

     Some feelings are vague and can’t be articulated.  Even as a child I was disquieted by the notion that everyone came to america to escape oppression or to seek religious freedom.  I saw but couldn’t articulate the two facedness of this notion.  Only in the last decade or so have I found the means to acquire the necessary knowledge and developed modes to express it.

     Quite frankly the US was used as a haven for many, many revolutionary groups.  Perhaps the American Revolution  caused most Americans to look upon all revolutions as beneficent.  I couldn’t and can’t see it tht way.

     American ‘malcontents’ were told to shut up while a malcontent could come from anywhere else in the world and be honored for resisting repression.  I mean, criminals, murderers, mere disturbers of the peace in their own countries.  Cranks.  East Indian malcontents gathered in San Francisco to plot against the British Raj.  Sun Yat Sen lived in LA where he raised funds and was lionized.  Homer Lea was recruited by Sun Yat Sen to serve as a general in the Chinese Army.  Lea’s story may have been the influence that charmed Burroughs into seeking a place in the Chinese Army.

     The United States not only knew of the malcontents’ activities but even tolerated them perhaps abetting them.  The US role in European history has been that of a spoiler.  Looking upon all colored peoples as victims needing their help Liberals could do no other than work for their interests against the Europeans.

     One of the more disastrous actions was John Hay’s Open Door policy in China.  At the time in the 1890s the European States were about to partition China into spheres of influence.  What the result would have been is anybody’s guess however the world would probably be much different today.  Hay’s Open Door policy scotched the partition with the result that China remained a unified State.  Of all the turning points one can find in history this is undoubtedly a turn in the tide of fortunes for the West.  Subsequent to the Hay policy Chinese revolutionaries were hosted in California.  Mexican gun runners operated from the US during the Mexican Revolution as Zane Grey records in novels like The Light Of Western Stars and Desert Gold.

     Of course the Irish who called Ireland the Ould Sod and America the New Island acted as one people divided by an ocean.  Funds and guns were raised in America and used in Ireland against the British.  In the unrestricted immigration of the time Irish revolutionists moved back and forth across the Atlantic.  If arrested in Ireland they claimed American citizenship and were released to return to the US.

     In 1919 a most egregious example occurred which received no reprimand from the US, while England didn’t even bother to file an objection.  Eamon De Valera, the future premier of Ireland escaped the British to be smuggled to the US where he functioned openly.  William K. Klingaman tells the story in his popular history ‘1919’ of 1987:

     Eamon De Valera, meanwhile, had been smuggled out of Ireland and into the United States, where he was touring the major cities along the East Coast, drumming up financial support for Sinn Fein and the Irish Republic.  His reception was nothing short of spectacular.  De Valera was given the presidential suite at the Waldorf; the Massachusetts state legislature received him in a special joint session; forty thousand wildly cheering supporters turned out to hear one of his speeches in Boston; and the press seemed to love him wherever he went.  After all, he was excellent copy, and news of English injustices in Ireland always sold plenty of papers.  As the Nation noted with bemusement, “He gets a front-page spread whenever he wants it, with unexampled editorial kindliness thrown in.”  The tall, very thin, dark Irishman brought no message of peace and goodwill to the United States, however.  Now that the Peace Conference was over and freedom-loving Irishmen still remained enslaved under the British yoke, De Valera told an enthusiastic audience in Providence, “the war front is now transferred to Ireland.”

     So, while the Irish were embattled on the Ould Sod, the Irish of the New Island had enough influence and power to baffle any objections either in the US or England.  They were truly functioning as a state within a state in the US and as revolutionists on the Ould Sod.  Thus the US influence in international politics was unique indeed.

     The Italians also functioned as emigrant workers of Italian citizenship before the War and were an irredentist population within the United States with many colonial beach heads.  After the war, assuming the continuance of unrestricted immigration Mussolini attempted to shift the cost of medical treatment for wounded Italian soldiers by sending them to the US for free medical treatment.  This is astonishing stuff that gets no notice in history books.

     Of course, the most famous instance of dual citizenship of a divided homeland is that of the Jews.

     A ship landed in the seventeenth century in New York City, New Amsterdam as it was known then, bearing a hundred plus Sephardic Jews from Brazil.  The next immigrant cadre were the German Jews mainly from 1830 to 1850.  These two immigrations were small compared to the influx of millions of Jews from the Pale of Settlement usually known as Polish or Russian Jews.  From 1870 to 1914 they came in increasing numbers.  As I have detailed elsewhere the intent to transfer the whole population of Jews from the Pale to the United States was aborted by the outbreak of the Great War.

     Jews had always been forbidden Great Russia.  However during an expansionist phase Russian annexed the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the North.  The annexed areas became the Pale Of The Settlement along with the Polish Jews acquired by the first partition of Poland.  Thus Jewish nationalism came into conflict with Russian assimilationism.  The Russians, of course, were sovereigns of the land while the Jews were a stateless nationality.  The Russians along with the rest of their acquired  peoples attempted to Russify the Jews.  These along with Poles, Letts, Estonians, Lithuanians and whatever resisted Russification.  In point of fact, the Czars had bitten off more than they could chew.

     Had the Russians been facing mere dissident peoples they may have been able to manage them.  But, along about mid-nineteenth century the political ideology of Communism provided a framework within which all peoples could combine thus submerging their national identities for their political goals.  It is true that fifty to sixty percent of all Comunist parties were Jewish but the remainder which was substantial, wasn’t.  As part of its ideology Communism discouraged nationality so it was possible for numbers of all nationalities to work together.

     The Russians became the adversaries of the Jews, the Czar their bete noir.  Thus a remendous undeclared war existed between the Communist Revolution, usually called just The Revolution and the Russian government and people.

     By the time the Jewish emigration to America began in earnest in the 1870s the Jewish mind was conditioned by this warfare.  Now, all Israel is one.  Therefore the German Jews who had preceded the Jews from the Pale prepared the way for those from the Pale.  Whole industries were immediately controlled by Jews.  The male and female garment industries being the prime example.  The work force of these industries was almost entirely Jewish.  Thus the infamous sweat shop may be said to be of Jewish origin although it is usually used to defame the United States.

     The whole garment industry of the country then was controlled from New York City.  We’re talking big money with a lot of it flowing into Jewish agencies sometimes euphemistically called charities.  This money in turn fueled worldwide Jewish warfare on Russia.

     The Equitable Insurance fraud for instance was caused by the international banker Jacob Schiff who as administrator looted the Equitable of a couple hundred million dollars to finance the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese war of 1903-05.  The Japanese could not have fought the war without that money.  Thus Schiff and his people paved the way to Pearl Harbor.

     While the Russians had their hands full in the East Schiff and his fellow Jews engineered and financed the First Russion Revolution.  The signing of the Russo-Japanese Peace Treaty was done at Portsmouth, New Hampshire ostensibly by then US President Theodore Roosevelt but under the watchful eyes of Schiff and his fellows.

     As I have said simply because a people emigrated doesn’t mean they renounced their original identity.  Witness the Irish.  As is clear from their intent to evacuate the Pale in favor of America the Jews retained their Eastern European interests.  This would be even more manfest after the restriction of immigration at the end of the War.

     Like the Irish who used American citizenship to negate the laws of England the Jews used their American citizenship to thwart the interests of Russians, or the Czar as they put it.

     The Russians forbade Jewish traffic over their borders in an attempt to contain Jewish subversion.  If you were in, you were in, if you were out you were out.  In line with European concepts of nationality this was workable.  But Jews resident in America using their US citizenship, in this instance, demanded to be treated strictly as US citizens but of the Jewish ‘religion.’  Thus, they said Russia could not refuse them entrance on the basis of their ‘religion.’

     The US with its polyglot population all with US citizenship whether Irish, Jewish, Italian or whatever had to insist on the rights of all US citizens.  Thus Jews were able to travel freely across Russian borders to coordinate Jewish actions to subvert the Russian State.  As I have pointed out, after the Revolution the name Russia was dropped from the State name as it became the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics governed almost exclusively by non-Russians.

     The B’nai B’rith had been around since 1843.  Then the American Jewish Committee was created in 1906.  Within seven years Jewish influence had increased so signficantly that they were able to direct US policy to the extent that diplomatic relations were broken off between Russia and the US in 1913 the year the Liberal Coalition elected Woodrow Wilson as its first president.  From 1913 to 1933 the US had no diplomatic relations with Russia/USSR.  It is interesting that relations with a legitimate government were discontinued by Woodrow Wilson and resumed with an illegitimate government by his disciple Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  On of his first acts as President.

     In 1913 the B’nai B’rith created its terrorist arm the Anti-Defamation League.  So there was actually a dual drive to acquire control of the USSR and the USA which one might add came very close to succeeding.  And this be a very small but dedicated number of people.

     As I point out in Part IV in 1919 the AJC  contacted Burroughs undoubtedly amongst a host of others to endorse a Jewish Bill Of Rights.  The program was in place by 1920 when this segment of my study ends.

     As can be seen the unofficial role of the United States in world affairs was an unsettling and disturbing one of the inactive aiding and abetting of revolutionary movements from China to India, across the border into Mexico while actively aiding if not abetting the Irish against England and aiding and abetting if not supporting the Jewish war on Russia.

     To the American Liberal all these revolutionary efforts were being conducted by victims.  Hence Liberal efforts at directing American policy were in the interests of any revolutionary group which includes the Socialist and Communist parties.  This Liberal attitude continues worldwide to the present time.

     Within the United States these ‘victims’ were gathered together under the aegis of the Liberal Coalition.  All dissenters whether anti-immigrationists, nativists or whatever were pathologized as mentally unstable people.  Insanity then becomes a religious attitude complementary to terms such as heretic, infidel or anti-Semite; terms not to be taken seriously.

     Liberalism is a religion thus assuming control over institutions of hgher learning.  The University system of the United States was turned from one of educational insitutions into religious seminaries.  The American university system of today is a religious system of Liberal seminaries.  Only the correct religious view is permitted, any other is penalized.

     Now, the Liberals who derived from the Puritans were an Old Testament biblical group who considered themselves the successosrs of the Hebrews as a Chosen People.  Beginning in 1870 the original Chosen People began their invasion.  It was like two Napoleons meeting in an insane asylum.  Each considered the other an imposter.  But the Jews had the whip hand over the Liberals as they quickly controlled the communiations media gradually eliminating anything seditious to its belief system.  As I explained earlier any writing that casts doubt on the claims of Judaism is anti-Semitist.  Americans were conditioned to view anti-Semitism as the worst possible crime deserving imprisonment or expulsion from the body social.  What we really have is the reimposition of the medieval Catholic Church in the form of Judaism.  Having seized control of the political system of the United States by 1920 the other important object was the discrediting of Science.

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from the flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

     And Poe might have added:  God from his heaven/ pleasant summer dreams of chosenness from our minds.  Yes, Science was the great enemy, the great anti-Semite.  It is not particularly well known but Jews are more anti-evolution than even the Christian fundamentalists of Tennessee in the twenties or the Kansans of today.  Evolution absolutely denies the fact that the world was created by god 4004 years before Bishop Ussher or the year 5778 or whatever of the Jewish calendar.  Make no mistake the notion of the world having been created by god recently is fundamental to Semitic religions.  Once it is disallowed the basis of the Semitic religions ends.  You can see why they fight so hard against Science.

     Science still being the problem religion was cloaked in its guise.  The scienfific Socialism of Marx is little more than Talmudic Judaism.  Freud’s exaltation of the subconscious is little more than an assault on the conscious rational thinking that makes Science possible.  Einstein’s preposterous notion of the ‘fabric’ of Time and Space among others is a disguised attempt at imposing faith.

     All of these movements came to fruition in the Second Decade.  Einstein’s theories were supposedly proven during an eclipse of the sun in 1919 during which it was ‘confirmed’ that the light of distant stars streamed around immovable bodies.   I mean, the Greeks said it:  What happens when an easily resistible force meets an immovable object?  It flows around it just like water around a rock suspended in a stream.  Boy, you have to be a genius to figure that one out- wrap it up in the facric of Time and Space and send it as present to God.

     So, the problem still remained what to do with the ‘pathological’ types who gave the lie to the Judeo-Liberal doctrine?  Science and Religion cannot co-exist.  This is a sea change in human consciousness comparable  to the transition from the Matriarchal to the Patriarchal.  Good will is not the problem and cannot solve the problem.  In 1943 Gustavus Myers devised the current method of interpreting American history in his book The History Of Bigotry In The United States.  He thus provided the means to pathologize the non-Judeo-Liberal people.  They became irrational, insane, evil bigots.  So then one has the people of the book the Judeo-Liberals on one side and ‘bigots’ on the other.  So, Moslem-Infidels, Semites-anti-Semites, and Liberals-Bigots.  It isn’t rational, it’s religious.  Virtue goes with the one; criminality with the other.  Once you are accused there is no argument.  Confess your heresy and take your punishment.  The role model is the Inquisition of the Catholic Church.

     Myers began from the beginning hitting his stride with the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s.  He essentially made all immigrants victims in the Liberal sense by depicting them as virtuous innocents insanely treated by American ‘bigots.’  Hence the title of his book.  His school took root and flourishes today.  Oscar Handlin, John Higham, Richard Slotkin.

     Handlin’s stuff is irrational.  John Higham’s Strangers In The Land is valuable but skewed.  The skewing can be easily unscrambled.  But Richard Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation is of importance to Burroughs and our theme here.  The first 225 pages of Slotkin’s book lead up to a denunciation  of Burroughs as the premier bigot of American literature actually making him responsible for the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam.  The first 225 pages are worth reading although you can throw the rest of the book away.

     I’ll get back to the scientific aspects of the issue in a minute but, first, as Slotkin concentrates on the Western movie in American culture let’s take a look at one of the premier efforts in the genre, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.  The movie was scripted by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck or, since this is Hollywood, men who would answer to those names. They are probably jewish.  The film perfectly inllustrates the Liberal dogma.

     John Wayne plays the Liberal lead as Tom Doniphon, strange name, along with his noble Negro sidekick, Pompey.  Lee Marvin plays a deranged psychopathic Anglo named Liberty Valence.  Jimmy Stewart plays the long suffering representative of the Law, Ransom- Rance- Stoddard.  Rance is an adjunct to Tom Doniphon.  Liberals = The Law, Bigots (Liberty Valence) = the outlaws.

     Tom can be seen as the abolitionist, justice seeking Liberal aiding the victims.  He is on the side of the victims of Liberty Valence (read, say, the KKK) which is the whole town except himself.  Tom has his negro valet while he helps all the cute immigrants in town still being aloof from the Southwest town’s sizable but segregated Mexican population.

     The scripters assigned the odd name of Liberty Valence to Lee Marvin.  Liberty is a positive virtue while Valence means strong- strong for freedom.  There is little positive about Valence.  He is in fact a psychopathic killer who terrorized the town of law seeking innocent sodbusters.  He actually becomes insane when he extends his whip handle just beating the tar out of his victims.  Valence is employed by the evil cattlemen (read, say, The South) above the Picket Wire (a river).  Why the cattlemen have sent Valence to the town isn’t clear.

     As the representative of the Old South and also any stray anti-Semitic clans who may happen to be about, Valence is especially offended by the peaceable but effeminate Rance Stoddard, who at one point actually wears an apron, the man who is bringing THE LAW West of the Pecos or at least below the Picket Wire.  Apparently the ranchers don’t need no law above the Picket Wire.  Valence harasses and bullies Stoddard who is usually protected by the omnipotent Tom Doniphon but comes a time when   Stoddard realizes he has to fight.  After all a man’s a man for all that.  Don’t know what for though, either his honor or life  or maybe to move the plot along.  Liberty is goading Rance into a gunfight that will be plain murder, as quite frankly, Rance don’t know how to handle a gun and Liberty does, oh boy.

     As the gunfight is filmed from behind Rance it appears that he actually guns Liberty down freeing all the victims of his menace. (The Law vs. The Outlaw; The Liberal vs. The Bigot, The Semite vs. the anti-Semite.)  Thus Rance brings the law to Shinbone, that’s the ridiculous name of the town.  You can see why Liberty terrorized it.

     Later we will see the same gun battle rotated ninety degrees to the right.  Ol’ Tom isn’t going to let Liberty gun down Rance, and also he doesn’t want Rance to be guilty of bloodshedding so he takes the guilt on hisself as he knowed he would.  He and his faithful Negro sidekick cum African gunbearer Pompey (This may be the reason Cassius Clay changed from his ‘slave’ name to Mohammed Ali, another slave name) are standing in an alley opposite Liberty’s left side.  Tom is in the middle of the side street, Pompey bearing the gun, stands against the side of the building.  With breathtaing precision just before Liberty shoots, Tom, in that awe inspiring quitet uncontradictable authority of his says like the Great White Hunter of Africa:  Gun, Pompey.  The ever faithful Negro flips the rifle across to Tom who snatches it from mid-air with is right hand, puts it to his shoulder and snaps off a head shot through the temple that killed Liberty Valence.  (Evil disappears from the town.)

     In order to kill Valence Tom had to shoot him in the left side of his head yet none of the dumbheads of the town wonders how Stoddard accomplished this miraculous feat.

     At any rate Rance is known as the man who shot Liberty Valence.  The old peace loving legalist is carrying his burden of blood guilt pretty well until he is nominated to be the new Congressman from the Picket Wire/Shinbone district (There’s a joke in there somewhere isn’t there?) and from whence he can put those damnable evil, bigoted ranchers in their place.  But damn it, he’s got blood on his hands; how can he serve the people in Washington since he is impure?  This mght have ruined a very promising and lucrative career and perhaps a good movie but Tom takes this moment to tell Rance the True story of the man who shot Liberty Valence.  Rance had to be told this.

     ‘Hot diggity-dog!’ Exclaims Rance trampling over Tom in his hurry to be the next and first representative for Picket Wire.  There may have been gold in them thar hills but it was as nothing compared to the gold to be found in Washington D.C.

     Like a good myth the movie can viewed on several different levels.  At face value the story is the story.  It doesn’t take much to view the film as a satire while on another level as a black comedy, or a wry commentary on the difference between the way things appear and the way they really are.

     But on the allegorical level in which I am viewing the story it allegorized the Judeo-Liberal vision of America.  Tom/ Rance represents their vision of themselves while Liberty is ther vision of bigots/anti-Semites.  I don’t know about the writers but John Ford was certainly able to see it that way.

     As a religious metaphor the movie expresses the Judeo-Liberal vision of itself.  That vision can only be realized if science can be disposed of because science, the truth, is the greatest anti-Semite of all.  As Poe realized Science disposes of the idea of God.  Without god there is no Judaism or Liberalism.  One or the other has to go.

     As I have said technological applications of science weren’t actually a threat but Evolutionists like Gall,  Darwin and Dalton were.  Gall was the man who first enunciated a theory that the different areas of the brain controlled different actions or responses.  In Steven Pinker’s terms he discovered the brain was more than a meatloaf.

     Darwin proposed the idea of evolution while Francis Galton proposed the idea of Eugenics.  As I said before, revealed Religion arrives complete and entire being a product of the imagination no different than Tarzan Of The Apes.  Science has to be built up step by step.  Gall, Darwin and Galton took the first developmental steps and while true in their limited way were easy to attack.

     Gall’s exploiters developed the theory of Phrenology which is of course unsupportable so If anyone has heard of Gall he is immediately discredited for Phrenology, something he didn’t do.

     Going into the Second Decade Darwin and Galton had great credibility, if being in minority positions, although Eugenics was very well received by every shade of the political spectrum from far left to far right.  Richard Slotkin bases his attempts to discredit Edgar Rice Burroughs and all non-Coalition writers over Evolution and Eugenics.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs is usually considered a fantasy writer.  One could hardly consider the writer of the Mars, Venus, Pellucidar and Tarzan series anything else.  Fantay writers are not usually taken very seriously being relegated to the non-literary end of of the fiction spectrum.  So then, one asks, why does a Myerian Judeo-Liberal like Richard Slotkin devote so much effort to prove that Edgar Rice Burrughs was ultimately responsible for the My Lai Massacre?

     The simple answer is that Burroughs is one of the most influential mind forming writers of fiction, worldwide, of the Twentieth Century…and counting.  There have been serious efforts to designate Burroughs as a bigot and an anti-Semitist.  The editions of the copies you read have actually been bowlderized.  Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation is a serious attempt to pathologize Burroughs.

     Gunslinger Nation Is the third volume of a trilogy on violence in America, a never ending tiresome concern of the Coalition.  Slotkin is more at home in the nineteenth century of the two first volumes than he is in the twentieth century of this volume.  He should have suspended his pen after the second volume.

     He not only has a shallow appreciation of his theme but he admits it.  The remaining 400+ pages succeeding those on Burroughs are based, I suspect, on one time viewings of several hundred Western movies.  At least he says he’s seen them.  His analysis of categories within the genre and individual films leaves much to  be desired.

     He admits that he read no, or very few, Western novels from 1900-1975 because the field is so vast no one could be expected to do it.

     His nineteenth century material, if skewed in interpretation, is admirably presented.  By rotating the images 180 degrees one can obtain a fairly accurate picture of his subjects.  His presentation on Buffalo Bill and his Wild West was really quite good.  His views on Fenimore Cooper and the Dime Novelists were attractive if prejudiced.

     By the time he gets to Burroughs of whom he has cursorily read a dozen novels or so he is both uncomprehending and imcomprehensible.  He has made no effort to understand the man yet he comes to preposterous conclusions.  As Burroughs was of the Scientific Consciousness which gives the lie to the Religious Consciousness Slotkin attacks on the scientific level.

     He attacks through Gall, Darwin and Galton.  The Liberal Coalition using its religious mentality is able to condemn in others what it applauds in itself.

     The mentality is quite capable of including Burroughs, Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler in one breath as though all three men were on the same level.  What they call crimes in others they call virtues in themselves.

     Thus, during the French Revolution a factory was organized in Paris to make footwear from the skins of murdered aristocrats.  The fact has been suppressed while the story of the lampshades made from the skins of enemies of the Fascist State is held as inhuman.

     The great hero of the Revolution, Victor Hugo, writing in his novel 1793 during the 1860s about the massacres in the Vendee quite bluntly states that those people were in the way of the realization of the Utopian Communist State and had to be removed.  What was fact in 1793 was true in the 1860 mind of Victor Hugo, exercised by the Communists after 1917 and by extension is still applicable today.  Yet all other exterminations are evil in the Coalition mind.  Their own religion justifies their actions as justified sinners.

     During the second and third decades Galton’s ideas on Eugenics had become the vogue.  The use of Eugenics by Hitler and the Nazis is used to discredit the concept and yet Reds of all hues including H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were enthusiastic Eugenicists.

     Joseph Stalin, the greatest Red who ever lived, rather amusingly embraced Eugenics.  (see:  http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/print.cfm?id=2434192005 )

     In the 1920s before Hitler, Stalin ordered his scientists to breed a new super warrior.  “I want a new invincible human being, insensible to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”

     You can see where this leading I’m sure.  Apparently Stalin had been reading Burrughs’ Beasts Of Tarzan because he ordered the scientists to cross a human and an ape to create his New Order warrior.  Imagine a couple divisions of these shaggy haired ape men trudging through the snow behind a line of tanks with a AK 47 in one hand and a frozen banana in the other.

     At any rate Slotkin wishes to link Burroughs up with these ideas that Liberals themselves promoted.  As the second decade wore on a number of writers dealt with these emerging problems of the age.  The two most prominent American bete noirs of the Judeo-Liberals are Madison Grant and his Passing Of The Great Race of 1916 and Lothrop Stoddard and his The Rising Tide Of Color of 1920.  As these men are scientists they were labeled ‘bigots’ which is to say heretics or anti-Semites by the Liberal Coalition.

     It is not impossible that Burroughs may have read these books but there is no indication he did so so that there is no confirmed connection between he and Grant and Stoddard.  As I read Slotkin he believes that Burroughs is complicit with both Madison Grant and Stoddard.  Further there is no doubt Slotkin believes all three men are bad with evil intent.  As the Scienfific findings of these men contradict the religious tenets of the Myersian Liberal Coalition I suppose Slotkin can do no other.  How he manges to lump Burroughs in as an evil malicious bigot seems a stretcher.

     In the first place although the findings of Grant and Stoddard are offensive to Slotkin and the Liberal Coalition they nevertheless show the honest unbiased scientific results of the research of honest scholars who are no less decent and honorable than any of the Liberal Coalition.  Grant’s work is an essay into proto-genetics for which subsequent learning shows no fault.  Stoddard’s work is an excellent faultless political analysis which has been borne out by subequent developments.

     While the Liberal Coalition has chosen to pathologize and demonize all three of these writers their opinion should just be waved aside, disregarded as irrelevant.  Their opinions should be marginalized.  Grant and Stoddard are good and honorable men.

     When I first read Slotkin’s analysis of Burroughs I was outraged and then baffled.  I rejected the criticism but as Slotkin obvously believes this stuff although he poorly documents it his notions were filed in the bck of my brain while I began to search for his reasons.

     From a scientific point of view Slotkin has no basis for his claims but when one lays the Judeo-Red-Liberal matrix over the science all becomes clear.  This is a conflict betwen Arien Age religion and twentieth century science.

     If one looks closely at Burroughs one will find he has embraced science and rejected religion thus immediately becoming classified as a bigot/anti-Semite in their eyes.

     While Burroughs was from the North he is not in full sympathy with abolitionist and Liberal ideals.  he appears to reject the harshness of their attitude toward Southern Whites.  As in Marcia, John Hancock Chase from Baltimore living in New York City seems to be an attempt to reunify the country according to the ideas of Thomas Dixon, Jr.  and his Reconstruction novels and D.W. Griffith’s movie The Birth Of A Nation.  To merely be sympathetic to Southern Whites is to deny the victimhood of the Negroes which arouses the animosity of Liberals.  Burroughs has thus identified himself as a ‘bigot, heretic, anti-Semite’.  He is plainly the enemy of the Liberal Coalition.

     And, then, while Burroughs didn’t join organizations like the A.P.A.- American Protective Association- still, like his fellow writers Jack London and Zane Grey he regretted the passingof Anglo-Saxon dominated America.  He hated to see the Old Stock in decline.  Thus in the Myersian sense he becomes pathologized as a ‘bigot.’  From the Liberal point of view Burroughs is clearly guilty and should be banned from literature.  Put on the Liberal Index.  However one has to accept the Liberal point of view to think so.

     He rejects all religion but as to whether he specifically singles out Catholics, Jews or any other sect I don’t believe that there is a shred of evidence.

     One can’t read with his contemporaries eyes so perhaps what isn’t so clear now leaped out of the page then.  Burroughs ruminations on Eugenics, especially in the pages of Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar, may then have been more obvious to them than to us.  But at the same time his opinions wouldn’t have been offensive to them.  As the Liberals accepted Eugenics then as readily as anyone else it would seem that the present emphasis on Burroughs’ fascination with the subject arises primarily from the Liberal rejection of their own past although it is still possible that what contemporary Liberals accepted in themselves they rejected in others as they do today.

     While I originally rejected the notion that there was any reason to suspect Burroughs of being an ‘anti-Semite’ I think that if one is looking for indications from the Coalition point of view one can find them.  As I point out in Part IV the American Jewish Committee contacted him in 1919 while there are passages in Marcia Of The Doorstep that the Coalition could construe as anti-Semitism and for which Burroughs was possibly punished.

     Finally Burroughs as a follower of Teddy Roosevelt rather than Woodrow Wilson might have been suspect.  The period after the Great War when it became evident that a very large percentage of the immigrants did not really consider themselves American’s caused TR to remark that America had become merely an international boarding house.  Quite true but who would have thought anything else was possible?  Today the term ‘international boarding house’ might be interpreted as Diversity or multi-culturalism. TR was head of his times.

     The period ending in 1919 also represented the changing of the guard.  Buffalo Bill died in 1917 taking hs mythic Wild West with him to the grave.  He also represented the end of the first America.  The Anglo-Saxons who had won the West.  Of course the winners of the West were not nearly so Ango-Saxon as represented but in general it was true.  There are almost no non-Anglo-Saxon names in the novels of Zane Grey other than Mexican.

     Also in 1919 TR himself passed away just as he was scheduled to be the Republican Presidential candidate for 1910.  His loss was keenly felt by Burroughs and his friend Herb Weston.  I doubt TR could have adapted to the new problems America was facing even as well as Warren G. Harding did.  How TR might have interpreted the challenge to American Democracy of the Liberal Coalition isn’t too obvious.

4.

Recapitulation

      In 1066 and succeeding centuries the Norman Conquerors enslaved the Anglo-Saxons of East Anglia which was an affront deeply resented.  Take a lesson.

     In the sixteenth century when the printed Old Testament became universally available the East Anglians identified with the enslaved Hebrews of Exodus.  They elected themselves a Chosen People and developed the compensatory Utopian attitude of inherent virtue as the Chosen People Of God.

     In the seventeenth century New England was settled by emigrants from East Anglia.  Not just English but East Anglians.  Virginia was settle by descendents of the Norman conquerors of 1066.  The Virginians once again chose slavery as the method of labor.  First indentured White people then Africans.

     While Utopian ideals developed in New England the abolitionist movement began which resulted in the Civil War-War Between The States.  War between regions or actually a war between ideologies.  There was no chance the South was going to discontinue slavery anythime soon no matter what anyone says.

     In revenge for 1066 the Cavaliers (Whites) of the South were absolutely crushed giving up all rights by surrendering unconditionally.

     The nascent Liberal Party of Puritans elevated the Africans over the Cavaliers thus establishing their protectorship over the ‘victims’ which is characteristic of the faith while establishing their power over dissident Whites.  Thus the Liberals ultimately aligned themselves with all colored revolutionary movements in the world against White European conquerors.

     Within the United States they viewed immigrants as ‘victims’ of the Old Stock pathologizing the Old Stock as ‘bigots’ no better than the Cavaliers of the Old South or the Europeans.  All opponents of of their Liberal religious ideology which included the intellectual mindset of Science thus became wrong headed vile ‘bigots’ who had no right to live.  After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 the utopian Communist ideology became their politics; call it Socialism it comes out the same.

     As Edgar Rice Burrough was not a Liberal, not a Communist and not Religious but Scientific he unwittingly placed himself in opposition to the Liberal Coalition.  On that basis a serious attempt was made to abort his career while subsequently an attempt to erase his name and work from history is being conducted.

     Thus the twenties ushered in a new changed era fraught with new adjustments which were misunderstood or not understood at all.

     Burroughs career after 1920 has to be seen in the light of this concealed antagonism that he had to counter without being clear as to its causes.

     Thus the contrast  between The Mucker and Marcia Of The Doorstep can be seen as a response to two different challenges united by Burroughs personal psychological development.

Go To Part IV:of The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doorstep

 

A Review

The Low Brow And The High Brow

An In Depth Study Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’

The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doortstep

by

R.E. Prindle

Part II

Background Of The Second Decade- Personal

 

     Erwin Porges’ ground breaking biography Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Invented Tarzan is the basic source for the course of ERB’s life.  John Taliaferro’s Tarzan Forever is heavily indebted to Porges adding little new.  Robert Fenton’s excellent The Big Swinger is a brilliant extrapolation of Burroughs’ life taken from the evidence of the Tarzan series.

     Porges, the first to pore though the unorganized Tarzana archives, is limited by the inadequacies of his method and his deference for his subject.  His is an ideal Burroughs rather than a flesh and blood one.  Matt Cohen’s Brother Men: The Correspondene Of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Herbert T. Weston has provided much fresh material concerning ERB’s character.

     Bearing in mind always that Weston’s evaluation of Burroughs in his August 1934 letter in reply to Charles Rosenberg, whoever he was, about ERB’s divorce is one man’s opinion nevertheless his statements can be corroborated by ERB’s behavior over this decade as well as throughout his life.  My intent is not to diminish ERB in any way.  Nothing can take away the fact that Burroughs created Tarezan, but like anyone else he was subjected to glacial pressures that distorted and metamorphosed his character.

     During the Second Decade as he experienced a realization of who he was, or who he had always thought he should be, or in other words as he evolved back from a pauper to a prince, he was subjected to excruciatingly difficult changes.

     A key to his character in this period is his relationship to his marriage.  It seems clear that he probably would never have married, stringing Emma along until she entered spinsterhood while never marrying her.  He seemingly married her to keep her away from Frank Martin.  As he later said of Tarzan, the ape man should never have married.

     Rosenberg in his letter to Weston (p.234, Brother Men) said that ‘…Ed says he has always wanted to get rid of Emma….’  The evidence seems to indicate this.  After ERB lost Emma’s confidence in Idaho, gambling away the couple’s only financial resources, his marriage must have become extremely abhorrent to him.  I’m sure that after the humiliations of Salt Lake City this marriage had ended for him in his mind.  That it was his own fault changes nothing.  He may simply have transferred his self-loathing to Emma.

     That Emma loved and stood by Burroughs is evident.  that he was unable to regain her confidence is clear from his writing.  The final Tarzan novels of the decade in one of which, Tarzan The Untamed, Burroughs burns Jane into a charred mess identifiable only by her jewelry show a developing breach.  Probably the jewelry was that which ERB hocked as the first decade of the century turned.  Now, this is a fairly violent reaction.

     ERB states that he walked out on Emma several times over the years.  In Fenton’s extrapolation of Burroughs’ life from his Tarzan novels this period was undoubtedly one of those times.  There seems to have been a reconciliation attempt between Tarzan and Jane between Tarzan The Untamed and Tarzan The Terrible.  Then between Tarzan And The Golden Lion and Tarzan And The Ant Men ERB’s attempt to regain Emma’s confidence seems to have failed as Jane chooses the clown Tarzan- Esteban Miranda-, one of my favorite characters- over the heroic Tarzan -ERB – in Tarzan And The Ant Men.

     This undoubtedly began ERB’s search for a Flapper wife which took form in the person of Florence Gilbert beginning in 1927.

b.

     Weston says of ERB in his disappointment and rage over ERB’s divorce of Emma that ‘…the fact that Ed always has been unusual, erratic and perhaps queer, has been his great charm and attraction for me…’ (p.223, Brother Men)   There’s a remote possibility that ‘queer’ may mean homosexual but I suppose he means ‘odd’ or imcomprehensible in his actions.  The evidence for this aspect of ERB’s character is overwhelming while being well evidenced by his strange, spectacular and wonderful antics during the second decade.  When Weston says of him that ‘…there is no woman on earth that would have lived with him, and put up with him, except Emma…’ there is plenty of reason to accept Weston’s opinion.

     Part of ERB’s glacial overburden came from his father, George T. who died on February 13, 1913.  Burroughs always professed great love for his father, celebrating his birthday every year of his life, although one wonders why.

     Apparently George T. broadcast to the world that he thought ERB was ‘no good.’  His opinion could have been no secret to Burroughs.  Weston who says that he always maintained cordial relations with George T., still thought him a difficult man, always dropping  in to visit him on trips through Chicago said that George T. complained to him, ERB’s best friend, that his son was no good. While without disagreeing with George T. up to that point, Weston said that he thought there was plenty of good in ERB but that he just hadn’t shown it yet.  Kind of a back handed compliment, reminds me of Clarence Darrow’s defense of Big Bill Haywood:  Yeah, he did it, but who wouldn’t?’

     Such an opinion held by one’s father is sure to have a scarring effect on one’s character.  How exactly the effect of this scarring worked itself out during this decade isn’t clear to me.  Perhaps Burroughs’ mid year flight to California shortly after his father’s death was ERB’s attempt to escape his father’s influence.  Perhaps his 1916 flight was the same while his move to California in 1919 was the culmination of his distancing himself from his father.  That is mere conjecture at this point.

     Now, what appears erratic from outside follows an inner logic in the subject’s mind unifying his actions.  What’s important to the subject is not what obsevers think should be important.

c.

     The scholars of the Burroughs Bulletin, ERBzine and ERBList have also added much with additional niggardly releases of material by Danton Burroughs at the Tarzana archives.  One of the more valuable additions to our knowledge has been Bill Hillman’s monumental compilation of the books in ERB’s library.

     Let’s take a look at the library.  It was important to ERB; a key to his identity.  Books do furnish a mind, as has been said, so in that light in examining his library we examine the furnishing  of his mind.  The shelves formed an important backdrop to his office with his desk squarely in front of the shelves.  ERB is seated proudly at the desk with his books behind him.

     How much of the library survived and how much was lost isn’t known at this time.  Hillman lists over a thousand titles.  Not that many, really.  The library seems to be a working library.  There are no the long rows of matching sets by standard authors.  The evidence is that Burroughs actually read each and every one of these books.  They found their way into the pages of his books in one fictionalized form or another.  Oddly authors who we know influenced him greatly like London, Wells, Haggard and Doyle are not represented.

     Most of the works of these authors were released before 1911 when Burroughs was short of the ready.  Unless those books were lost he never filled in his favorites of those years.  That strikes me as a little odd.

     It is generally assumed that he picked up his Martian information from Lowell, yet in Skelton Men Of Jupiter he says:  ‘…I believed with Flammarion that Mars was habitable and inhabited; then a newer and more reputable school of scientists convinced me it was neither….’  The statement shows that Camille Flammarion’s nineteenth century book was the basis for Burroughs’ vision of Mars while Lowell was not.  Further having committed himself to Flammarion’s vision he was compelled to stick to it after he had been convinced otherwise.  When that understanding was obtained by him we don’t know but at sometime he realized that the early Martian stories were based on a false premiss.

     Thus, his Mars became a true fiction when his restless, searching mind was compelled by judicious reasoning of new material to alter his opinion.  That he could change his mind so late in life is an important fact.  It means that behind his fantasy was a knowledge of solid current fact.  The results of his pen came from a superior mind.  It was not the maundering of an illiterate but amusing boob.

     Organizing the books of his library into a coherent pattern is difficult.  I haven’t and I Imagine few if any have read all his list.  Based on my preliminary examination certain patterns can be found.  He appeared to follow the Chicago novel by whomever, Edna Ferber’s So Big is a case in point.  Seemingly unrelated titles can be grouped aorund certain Burroughs’ titles as infuences.

     In 1924 when Marcia Of The Doorstep was written ERB had already formed his intention of leaving, or getting rid, of Emma.  He began a fascination with Flappers that would result in his liaison with Florence.

     After the move to Hollywood in 1919 a number of sex and Flapper potboilers find their way into his library.  The tenor of literature changed greatly after the War showing a sexual explicitness that was not there prior to the Big Event.  To be sure the graphic descriptions of the sex act current in contemporary literature was not permissible but the yearning to do so was certainly there.  Language was retrained but ‘damn’ began to replace ‘d–n’ and a daring goddamn became less a rarity.

     Perhaps the vanguard of the change came in 1919 when an event of great literary and cultural import took place.  Bernarr Macfadden whose health and fitness regimes had very likely  influenced Burroughs during the first couple decades decided to publish a magazine called “True Story.”  The magazine was the forerunner of the Romance pulp genre while certainly being in the van of what would become the Romance genre of current literature.

     The advance was definitely low brow, not to say vulgar, indicating the direction of subsequent societal development including the lifting of pornographic censorship.  Pornography followed from “True Store” as night follows day.

     The magazine coincided with the emergence of the Flapper as the feminine ideal of the twenties.  In literature this was abetted by the emergence in literary fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  His Beautiful And Damned is a key volume in Burroughs’ library forming an essential part of Marcia.  To my taste Fitzgerald is little more than a high quality pulp writer like Burroughs.  I can’t see the fuss about him.  He riminds me of Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend and vice versa.  In fact, I think Jackson mined the Beautiful And  Damned.  Plagiarize would be too strong a word.

     “True Story” caught on like a flash.  By 1923 the magazine was selling 300,000 copies an issue; by 1926, 2,000,000.  Low brow was on the way in.  Vulgarity wouldn’t be too strong a word.  Macfadden had added titles such as “True Romances” and “Dream World” to his stable.  His magazine sales pushed him far ahead of the previous leader, Hearst Publications, and other publishers.  Pulpdom had arrived in a big way.

     Where Macfadden rushed in others were sure to follow.  The sex thriller, the stories of willful and wayward women, which weren’t possible before, became a staple of the twenties in both books and movies.

     ERB’s own The Girl From Hollywood  published in magazine form in 1922, book form in 1923, might be considered his attempt at entering the genre.  Perhaps if he had thrown in a few Flapper references and changed the appearance and character of his female leads he mgiht have created a seamless transition from the nineteenth century to the twenties.  A few Flapper terms might have boomed his ales much as when Carl Perkins subsititued ‘Go, cat, go’ for go, man, go’ in his Blue Suede Shoes and made sonversts of all us fifties types.

     Certainly ERB’s library shows a decided interest in the genre from 1920 to 1930.  Whether the interest was purely professional, an attempt to keep up with times, or personal in the sense of his unhappiness in his marriage may be open to question.  I would have to reread his production of these years with the New Woman in mind to seek a balance.

     Still, during the period that led up to his affair with Forence ERB seems to have been an avid reader of Flapper and New Woman novels.

     He had a number of novels by Elinor Glyn who was the model of the early sex romance.  He had a copy of E.M. Hull’s The Sheik, that shortly became the movie starring Rudolph Valentine with its passionate sex scenes.  A ‘Sheik’ became the male synonym for Elinor Glyn’s ‘It’ girl.

     Of course, the influence of Warner Fabian’s Flaming youth of 1923, both book and movie, on ERB is quite obvious.

      Just prior to this relationship with Florence he read a number of novels by Beatrice Burton with such sexy titles as The Flapper wife-The Story Of A Jazz Bride, Footloose, Her Man, Love Bound  and Easy published from 1925 to 1930.

     I would like to concentrate on Burton’s novels for a couple reasons; not least because of the number of her novels in ERB’s library but that when Burroughs sought publication for his low brow Tarzan in 1913-14 he was coldly rebuffed even after the success of his newspaper serializations.  The disdain of the entire publishing industry was undoubtedly because Burroughs was the pioneer of a new form of literature.  In its way the publication of Tarzan was the prototype on which Macfadden could base “True Story.”  Not that he might not have done it anyway but the trail was already trampled down for him.  In 1914 Burroughs violated all the canons of ‘polite’ or high brow literature.

     A.L. Burt accepted Tarzan Of The Apes for mass market publication reluctantly and only after guarantees for indemnification against loss.  Now at the time of Beatrice Burton’s low brow Romance genre novels, which were previously serialized in newspapers, Grosset and Dunlap sought out Burton’s stories publishing them in cheap editions without having been first published as full priced books much like Gold Seal in the fifties would publish paperback ‘originals’ which had never been in hard cover.  Writers like Burton benefited from the pioneering efforts of Burroughs.  G& D wasn’t going to be left behind again.  Apparently by the mid-twenties profits were more important than cultural correctness.

     As ERB had several Burton volumes in his library it might not hurt to give a thumbnail of who she was.  needless to say I had never read or even heard of her before getting interested in Burroughs and his Flapper fixation.  One must also believe that Elinor Glyn volumes in ERB’s library dating as early as 1902 were purchased in the twenites as I can’t believe ERB was reading this soft sort of thing as a young man.  Turns out that our Man’s acumen was as usual sharp.  Not that Burton’s novels are literary masterpieces but she has a following amongst those interested in the Romance genre.  The novels have a crude literary vigor which are extremely focused and to the point.  This is no frills story telling.  The woman could pop them out at the rate or two or three a year too.

     Her books are apparently sought after; fine firsts with dust jackets go for a hundred dollars or more.  While that isn’t particularly high it is more than the casual reader wants to pay.  Might be a good investment though.  The copies I bought ran from fifteen to twenty dollars, which is high for what is usually filed in the nostalgia section.  Love Bound was forty dollars.  I bought the last but it was more than I wanted to pay just for research purposes.

     There is little biographical information about Burton available.  I have been able to piece together that she was born in 1894.  No death date has been recorded as of postings to the internet so she must have been alive at the last posting which woud have made her a hundred at least.

     She is also known as Beatrice Burton Morgan.  She was an actress who signed a contract with David Belasco in 1909 which would have made her fifteen or sixteen.  Her stage name may have been Beatrice Morgan.  The New York Public Library has several contracts c. 1919 in her papers.

     One conjectures that her stage and film career was going nowhere.  In The Flapper Wife she disparages Ziegfeld as Ginfeld the producer of the famous follies.

     Casting about for alternatives in the arts she very likely noticed the opening in sex novels created by Macfadden and the Roaring Twenties.  The Flapper Wife seems to have been her first novel in 1925.  The book may possibly have been in response to Warner Fabian/Samuel Hopkins Adams’ Flaming Youth.

     As the motto for his book he had “those who know, don’t tell, those who tell, don’t know.’  The motto refers to the true state of mind of women.  Burton seems to have taken up the challenge- knows all and tells all.  Flapper Wife was an immediate popular success when taken from the newspapers by G&D.  Critics don’t sign checks so while their opinion is noted it is irrelevant.

     Burton apparently hit it big as the movies came afer her, Flapper Wife was made into a movie in 1925 entitled His Jazz Bride.  Burton now had a place in Hollywood.  Burroughs undoubtedly also saw the movie.  What success Burton’s later life held awaits further research.  As there is no record of her death on the internet it is safe to assume that when her copyrights were renewed in the fifties it was by herself.

     There are a number of titles in the library having to do with the Flapper.  The library, then gives a sense of direction to ERB’s mental changes.  There are, of course, the Indian and Western volumes that prepared his way for novels in those genres.  As always his off the top of his head style is backed by sound scholarship.

     The uses of the various travel volumes, African and Southeast Asian titles are self-evident.  I have already reviewed certain titles as they applied to Burroughs’ work; this essay involves more titles and I hope to relate other titles in the future.  So the library can be a guide to Burroughs’ inner changes as he develops and matures over the years.

     The amont of material available to interpret ERB’s life has expanded greatly since Porges’ groundbreaking biography.  Much more work remains to be done.

     The second decade is especially important for ERB’s mental changes as his first couple dozen stories were written beginnng in 1911.  Moreso than most writers, and perhaps more obviously Burroughs work was autobiographical in method.  As he put it in 1931’s Tarzan, The Invincible, he ‘highly fictionalized’ his details.  For instance, the Great War exercised him greatly.  From 1914 to the end of the War five published novels incorporate war details into the narrative:  Mad King II, Beyond Thirty, Land That Time Forgot, Tarzan The Untamed, and Tarzan The Terrible as well as unpublished works like The Little Door.  Yet I don’t think the extent that the War troubled him is recognized.  The man was a serious political writer.

     Thus between the known facts and his stories a fairly coherent life of Burroughs can be written.  My essays here on the ERBzine can be arranged in chronological order to give a rough idea of what my finished biography will be like.

     Burroughs was a complex man with a couple fixed ideas.  One was his desire to be a successful businessman.  This fixed obsession almost ruined him.  He was essentially a self-obsessed artist and as such had no business skills although he squandered untold amounts of time and energy which might better have been applied to his art than in attempts to be a business success.

     In many ways he was trying to justify his failure to be a business success by the time he was thirty rather than making the change to his new status as an artist.

     As a successful artist he was presented with challenges that had nothing to do with his former life.  These were all new challenges for which he had no experience to guide him while he was too impetuous to nsit down and thnk them out properly.  Not all that many in his situation do.  Between magazine sales, book publishing and the movies he really should have had a business manager as an intermdiary.  Perhaps Emma might have been able to function in that capacity much as H.G. Well’s wife jane did for him.  At any rate book and movie negotiations diverted time and energy from his true purpose of writing.

     His attempt to single handedly  run a five hundred plus acre farm and ranch while writing after leaving Chicago ended in a dismal failure.  Even his later investments in an airplane engine and airport ended in a complete disaster.  Thank god he didn’t get caught up in stock speculations of the twenties.  As a businessman he was doomed to failure; he never became successful.  It if hadn’t been for the movie adaptations of Tarzan he would have died flat broke.

     Still his need was such that he apparently thought of his writing as a business even going so far as to rent office space and, at least in 1918, according to a letter to Weston, keeping hours from 9:00 to 5:30.  Strikes me as strange.  Damned if I would.

     At the end of the decade he informed Weston that he intended to move to Los Angeles, abandon writing and, if he was serious, go into the commercial raising of swine.  The incredulousness of Weston’s reply as he answered ERB’s questions on hog feed comes through the correspondence.

     Think about it.  Can one take such flakiness on ERB’s part seriously?  Did he really think his income as a novice pig raiser would equal his success as a writer with an intellectual property like Tarzan?  Weston certainly took him seriously and I think we must also.  There was the element of the airhead about him.

     A second major problem was his attitude toward his marriage and his relationship with Emma.

     He appears to have been dissatisfied with both at the beginning and decade and ready to leave both at the end.  According to the key letter of Weston ERB was an extremely difficult husbnad with whom Emma had to be patient.  As Weston put it, no other woman would have put up with his antics.  Unfortunately he doesn’t give details of those antics but the indications are that Emma was a long suffering wife.

     ERB’s resentment of her apparently became an abiding hatred.  Danton Burroughs released information about ERB’s third great romance with a woman named Dorothy Dahlberg during the war years of WWII through Robert Barrett the BB staff writer in issue #64.

     After having been estranged from her husband for about a decade Emma died on 11-05-44, probably of a broken heart.  ERB returned to Los Angeles from Hawaii to dispose of her effects.  Arriving on 11/19/44 after visiting his daughter he met with Ralph Rothmund in Tarzana where he proceeded to get soused, apparently in celebration of Emma’s death.

     To quote Barrett, p. 25, Burroughs Bulletin #64.

     After Ed met with Ralph Rothmund, he opened a case of Scotch and took out a bottle after which he drove to Emma’s home in Bel-Air- where he and Jack “sampled” the Scotch a couple times.”  From Bel-Air Jack drove Ed to the Oldknows, some friends also in Bel-Air, where they continued to sample the Scotch.  After this visit Ed and Jack returned to Emma’s home at 10452 Bellagio Road, where Jack brought out a nearly full bottle of bourbon.  Jack asked the maids to postpone dinner for 30 minutes, while they waited for Joan and Joan II.  This evidently irritated the two maids as they both quit  and walked out on them!  Ed reported in his diary that after the two maids walked out, ‘we had a lovely dinner and a grand time.”

     That sort of strikes me as dancing on the grave of Emma which indicates a deep hatred for her on the part of ERB.  We are all familiar with the storyof ERB’s pouring the liquor in the swimming pool humiliating Emma in front of guests which she stood so Weston must have known what he was talking about.

     There is a certain hypocrisy in Burroughs now getting blotto in celebration of Emma’s death.  Between the two of them in the space of a couple hours ERB and his son, John Coleman, finished a fifth of Scotch and went ripping through a bottle of bourbon.  I don’t know how rough and tough you are but that would put me under the pool table.

     In this inebriated and hostile state they apparently had words with what I assume to have been Emma’s long time maids.  Maids don’t walk out because you ask them to hold dinner for a few minutes.  Being a maid is a job; they don’t respond that way to reasonable requests.  So in his drunken state ERB must have been offensive about Emma or the maids causing their reaction.

     Thus sitting totally soused  in the ‘alcoholic’ Emma’s home they ‘had a lovely dinner and a grand time.’  The woman was both good to him and good for him but it isn’t incumbent on any man to see his best interests.  There was a crtain dignity lacking in ERB’s behavior at this good woman’s death, not to mention the hypocrisy of getting thoroughly jazzed.

d.

      The decade also witnesses the unfolding of ERB’s psyche from the repressed state of 1910 to an expanded and partially liberated state at the end of the decade when he fled Chicago.  Pyschologically ERB was always a dependent personality.  He let his editors both magazine and book bully him and take advantage of his good will.  He also needed a strong role model which is one reason his literary role models are so obvious.

     From 1911 to 1916 he seemed to lean on Jack London as his role model.  The problem with London is that we can’t be sure which of his books ERB read as he had none of his books in his library.  It seems certain that he read London’s early Gold Rush books.  ERB’s hobo information is probably based on London’s The Road and then he may possibly have read The Abyssmal Brute which is concerned with the results of the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries fight and a preliminary to The Valley Of The Moon. 

     It is difficult to understand how Burroughs could have read much during this decade what with his writing schedule and hectic  life style.  Yet we know for a fact that between 1913-15 he found time to read Edward Gibbon’s massive The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire.

     At the same time additions to his library from this decade are rather sparse, the bulk of the library seems to have been purchased from 1920 on.  Still, if one assumes that he read all the books of London including 1913’s Valley Of The Moon, then it is possible that his cross=country drive of 1916 may have been partially inspired by Billy and Saxon Roberts’ walking tour of Northern California and Southern Oregon in that book as well as on ERB’s hobo fixation.  Certainly London must have been his main influence along with H.H. Knibbs and Robert W. Service.  He may have wished to emulate London by owning a large ranch.

     I suspect he meant to call on London in Sonoma during his 1916 stay in California but London died in the fall of that year which prevented the possible meeting.  With the loss of London Burroughs had to find another role model which he did in Booth Tarkington.  He does have a large number of Tarkington’s novels in his library, most of which were purchased in this decade.  Tarkington was also closely associated with Harry Leon Wilson who also influenced ERB with a couple two or three novels in his library, not least of which is Wison’s Hollywood novel, Merton Of The Movies.  Just as a point of interest Harry Leon Wilson was also a friend of Jack London.

     ERB’s writing in the last years of the decade seems to be heavily influenced by Tarkington as in Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid, The Efficiency Expert and The Girl From Hollywood.

     Burroughs was an avid reader and exceptionally well informed with a penetrating mind so that his ‘highly fictionalized’ writing which seems so casual and off hand is actually accurate beneath his fantastic use of his material.  While he used speculations of Camille Flammarion and possibly Lowell on the nature of Mars he was so mentally agile that when better information appeared which made his previous speculations untenable he had no difficulty in adjusting to the new reality.  Not everyone can do that.

     I have already mentioned his attention to the ongoing friction between the US and Japan that appeared in the Samurai of Byrne’s Pacific island.  In this connection Abner Perry of the Pellucidar series is probably named after Commodore Matthew Perry who opened Japan in 1853.  After all Abner Perry does build the fleet that opened the Lural Az.  Admiral Peary who reached the North Pole about this time is another possible influence.  The identical pronunciation of both names would have serendipitous for Burroughs.

     As no man writes in a vacuum, the political and social developments of his time had a profound influence on both himself and his writing.

     The effects of unlimited and unrestricted immigration which had been decried by a small but vocal minority for some time came to fruition in the Second Decade as the Great War showed how fragile the assumed Americanization and loyalty of the immigrants was.  The restriction of immigration from 1920 to 1924 must have been gratifying to Burroughs.

     I have already indicated the profound reaction that Burroughs, London and White America in general had to the success of the Black Jack Johnson in the pursuit of the heavyweight crown.  The clouded restoration of the crown through Jess Willard did little to alleviate the gloom.  Combined with the sinking of the Ttitanic and the course of the suicidal Great War White confidence was irrevocably shaken.

     Burroughs shared with London the apprehension that the old stock was losiing its place of preeminence to the immigrants.  This fear woud find its place in Burroughs writing where he could from time to time make a nasty comment.  His characterization of the Irish is consistently negative while his dislike of the Germans first conceived when he saw them as a young man marching through the streets of Chicago under the Red flag was intense.  Their participation in the Haymarket Riot combined with the horrendous reports of German atrocities during the War reinforced his dislike almost to the point of fanaticism.  While the post-war German reaction in his writing was too belated he had been given cause for misinterpretation.

     Always politically conservative he was a devoted admirer of Teddy Roosevelt while equally detesting Woodrow Wilson who was President eight of the ten years of the Second Decade.  When the Bolsheviks took over Russia in 1917 polarizing public opinion into the Right and Left ERB was definitely on the Right.

     By the end of the decade the world he had known from 1875 to 1920 had completely disappeared buried by a world of scientific and technological advances as well and social and political changes that would have been unimaginable in his earlier life.  The changes in sexual attitudes caused by among others Krafft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger would have been astounding.

     The horse had been displaced by the auto.  Planes were overhead.  The movies already ruled over the stage, vaudeville and burlesque.  Cities had displaced the country.  The Jazz Age which was the antithesis of the manners and customs of 1875-1920 realized the new sexual mores so that the Flapper and Red Hot Mama displaced the demure Gibson Girl as the model of the New Woman.

     When ERB moved from Chicago to LA in 1919 he, like Alice, virtually stepped through the looking glass into a world he never made and never imagined.  A Stranger In A Strange Land not different in many ways from the Mars of his imagination.

Go to Part III- Background Of The Second Decade Social And Political

 

 

 

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#16 Tarzan And The City Of Gold

Part 2

by

R. E. Prindle

 

     The City Of Gold itself, which is a white and gold city, evokes the image of the red and gold ruin of Opar and the Forbidden City of the same title, as well as The White City of the Columbian Exposition.  As Burroughs was writing construction was going on for Chicago’s second great exposition on the fortieth anniversary of the first.  Chicago, incorporated in 1833, was about to present its Century Of Progress expo of 1933-34.  So Burroughs would have had his mind redirected to the scenes of his childhood.

     What I am going to suggest may seem far fetched to many but having gained some idea of the way Burroughs’ mind worked I think the suggestion plausible.  Emmett Dedmon tells the following story about the Great Sandow at the ’93 Expo.  If anyone doesn’t know Sandow by now he was the first great bodybuilder who also performed at the Expo.  As Florenz Zeigfeld was representing Sandow there is a no reason to think of the story as other than a publicity stunt, but I leave the judgment to you. (Emmett Dedmon, Fabulous Chicago, 1953, NY, p. 235)

     Amy Leslie, the drama critic for the News, described Sandow as a  fascinating mixture of brute force and poetic sentimentality.  On a walk through the Wooded Island…Sandow snipped a tiny cup from a stock of snapdragon.  “now, when we were little in Germany,” Sandow told the astonished Miss Leslie, “we took these blossoms and pressed them so, and if the flower mouth opened, why that was a sign they were calling us home.”  As Amy reported it, “he touched the tinted bud and its rosy lips parted in a perfumed smile.”  Just as Sandow finished his sentence, a Columbian guard shouted that he had violated the rule against picking flowers.  To emphasize the reprimand the guard seized Sandow by the elbow and attempted to push him away.  At this effrontery Sandow lifted the surprised guard off the ground and held him at arm’s length, examining him as though he were a curious discovery.  Miss Leslie, more conscious of the dignity of the law, persuaded Sandow to put the guard down, which the strong man did with an ouburst of German expletives and an explanation (in English) to Miss Leslie that he did not think much of humans as guards.  “I prefer nice well-bred dogs,” he said.

     This made a great story that made the rounds of the fair.  The question is did 17 year old Burroughs hear it and did it make an impression  on him?  Strangely enough we can definitely answer that question in the affirmative.  Nearly twenty years later Burroughs borrowed the incident for his first Tarzan novel.  Not only that but he has Tarzan play the part of Sandow.  So, Sandow, Tarzan; Tarzan, Phobeg.

     At the end of Tarzan Of The Apes Burroughs replicates the Sandow scene on the Wooded Island when he terrorizes Robert Canler holding him at arms length with one hand.  Thus in this novel Tarzan not only holds Sandow/Phobeg at arm’s length but raises him above his head throwing him into the stands.  Burroughs usually has his characters going their models one better as Tarzan does here.

     As Sandow was strolling through the Wooded Island  with Miss Leslie so Tarzan strolls through town with Gemnon.  Instead of picking a flower Tarzan notices a lion eating a human while no one takes any notice.  Cosmopolitan Tarzan inquires for an explanation.  Gemnon calmly explains the quaint custom just as Sandow so pleasantly explained his snapdragon story.  Dragons, lions, all the same thing.  Burroughs does a neat parody and makes his joke but the original was such a great story he can’t let it go.

     Indeed, Tarzan’s habit of picking men up and tossing them around can probably be traced back to this one arm trick of Sandow’s.  Like I said, you’ll probably think it’s a stretcher but I think it both plausible and probable.  Can’t be absolutely proven of course, but we can and have proven that the incident left an indelible imprint of ERB’s memory.

     That said and moving along to 1920-24 there is also a flavor of H.G. Wells’ utopian novel Men Like Gods to be found here.  Once again Burroughs turns Wells’ utopia around a bit but the tour of Cathne with Gemnon seems to be a paraody of a similar tour in Men Like Gods.  ERB was still in the thick of his literary duel with Wells at the time.

     The plot involving Nemone is slightly more complex and better worked out than is usual for ERB.  Tomos, Erot, M’Duze and Nemone reflect other influences.  The plot has the feel of French overtones.  Of course we know that ERB read Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries Of Paris, Dumas’ Three Musketeers and The Count Of Monte Criisto, while the prisoner behind the golden door points in the direction of The Man In The Iron Mask.  We also know that ERB had read Victoy Hugo’s Les Miserables.

     All these may have provided some inspiration.  However more directly influential I believe are two other books found in ERB’s library as listed on ERBzine. ( www.erbzine.com )  They are Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche and Stanley J. Weyman’s Under The Red Robe.  Never heard of Stan Weyman?  Me neither but, believe it or not, there is a Stanley J. Weyman Society on the internet that you may join if so inclined.

     Both books were hugely influential in Hollywood, each being filmed several times with at least one version getting very good reviews.  Let’s start with Sabatini.  While Weyman, one would believe is all but forgotten, Sabatini enjoyed an excellent reputation down to at least my graduation from high school.  Probably not so much lately although my copy of Scaramouche is the Common Reader edition published in 1999 so  there must be fans out there.

     Sabatini was Burroughs exact contemporary- 1875-1950.  Like Burroughs he had to defend himself against charges of plagiarism.  His stuff all reads like you’ve read it somewhere before, so in Scaramouche he presents an extended defense of himself.

     Nevertheless he writes in a simple direct style that is ‘easy to uderstand’ but cleverly presented.  Sabatini was obviously one of the first to understand that stories written like movie scenarios had a better chance of selling to the movies.

     Like Burroughs he has his point of view which is admirably presented.  Also like Burroughs he was intellectually unsympathetic to Communism.  His reaction was less emotional that ERB.  Although Scaramouche is about the opening years of the French Revolution Sabatini gives it only a slanting attention as he concentrates on people who are caught up in the flood much against their wishes.  In that sense there is very little politics in the novel.  The participants are merely caught up in the political events.

     Scaramouche is a country lawyer unsympathetic to revolutionary ideology but he becomes a revolutionary fugitive when his Red friend is murdered by a reactionary nobleman.  The story is well developed and an exciting one with a lot of swordplay.  In fact Scarmouche become the fastest swordsman of France.  You can see what drew ERB’s attention to the novel.

     Of more importance for ERB and an undeveloped subplot of City Of Gold is one that involves Scaramouche’s ancestry.  Bearing in mind that ERB became a voluntary orphan when he was sent to the MMA I think Burroughs found the mystery of Scaramouche’s ancestry compelling.  Scaramouch is named after the clown of the Italian Comedia Del Arte which also nests neatly with the clown aspect of ERB’s psychology.

     It is thought that Scaramouche was the illigetimate son of a village nobleman.  The fact that the boy was well looked after by this man seemed proof.  In fact, as we learn later in the book Scaramouche is the bastard son of his foster father’s sister, the noblewoman, Madame de Plougastel.  She bore Scaramouche illegimately then trusted him to her brother.  Thus on one side Scaramouche was of noble birth.  An orphan or pretended orphan’s dream.  His father remains a mystery for the moment. 

     Scaramouche’s friend had been murdered by the nobeman Le Tour d’Azyr.  Scaramouche had sworn an eternal enmity to him.  At a crucial moment in the story Scaramouche learns that this same La Tour d’Azyr is his father.  I should have seen it coming from a long way off but I didn’t.  It is possible that ERB was surprised too.  Sabatini handles it well.  Thus Scaramouche the illegitimate child is a nobleman by birth on both sides but the Revolution invalidates this advantage. 

     It would have been normal for Burroughs to have concocted a fantasy in which his parents now dead to him were not his real parents but some mysterious others.  In fact he did concoct two fantasies: the one of John Carter who has been alive forever but can remember no parents and Tarzan whose parents were killed with the result that he was raised by ape foster parents.  Not exactly noble people in the ordinary sense but his deceased parents were.  One imagines the impact this really good story had on him although he first read it in the early twenties.

     In any event he attempts to weave in a subplot providing mysterious parentage for Nemone and her brother Alextar.  The subplot isn’t very well developed.  On the one hand we are asked to suspect that Nemone was the child of the old king and a Black M’duze who in her youth was tall and beautiful while on the other hand it is insinuated that Nemone is the child of Tomos and M’duze.  The latter through her machinations has placed Nemone on the throne and imprisoned Alextar.  So Burroughs throws in some misceganation which has always been the most excing literary topic of America, then as now.

     Not convincingly done by ERB he had nevertheless carried the story of Scaramouche around in his head for a decade waiting for the opportunity to employ it.

     Another book in ERB’s library which is influential here is Stanley J. Weyman’s Under The Red Robe.  Like Scaramouche this story was very well thought of in Hollywood being filmed more than once.  It seems a fact that ERB saw the 1923 silent film.  He was so impressed that he went out and bought the 1923 Grosset and Dunlap Photoplay Edition.  I obtained an identical copy so as to to have read the same text and viewed the same plates.

     I think I’ll have to include a few of Burroughs’ experiences at the MMA to bring this all together.  It would seem that Sabatini considered himself a psychological orphan also.  The man was born in Italy to an Italian father and an English mother.  As they were traveling actors, not unlike what Scaramouche becomes at one point in his story, they sent young Rafael back to England to live with relatives.  As Sabatini’s stories often concern orphans it follows that his reaction to being put away from his parents was that he considered himself an orphan.

     Burroughs was also put away by his father.  Three times.  He was sent to Idaho, Massachusetts and Michigan.  Thus he too was put away by his parents.  As his reaction was to play the clown developing an off beat sense of humor we know that he reacted negatively to all this shuffling about.  His exile to the Michigan Military Academy was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  He rebelled, running away.  The incident is treated rather uncomprehendingly by Porges in his biography which of course is my authority. 

     From ERB’s point of view the MMA was an elite reformatory school where bad rich boys were offloaded by their parents.  Thus the boy was declassed and slgihtly criminalized in his own mind.  As he treated his own sons and the Gilbert boy the same way it is easy to see how seriously he was affected by the experience.  ERB was cast adrift with no direction home which happened so many times to characters in his stories, most notably in the original short version of The Lad And The Lion.  ERBzine should publish the magazine version of this novel

     Having run away from the MMA he was promptly escorted back by his father becoming in his own mind an orphan as in Tarzan’s case and a motherless child as in John Carter’s.  Like the race horse Stewball of musical fame, Carter just blew down in a storm.  Another standard orphan’s solution to being forced outside society.

     Stanley J. Weyman’s (1855-1929) novel also meshes with this persona.  As a result of his mistreatment Burroughs developed a very negative self-conception.  He became, in fact, a ne’er-do-well.  Much to his father’s satisfaction I might add.  This self-conception would explain his eccentric behavior from the time he left the MMA in 1896 through 1903 if not for the rest of his life.  The man was conflicted.  On the one hand he knew he was very capable and on the other he felt worthless so he sought failure.

     A fact easily glided over is his quarterbacking and captaincy of the MMA football team.  One’s team members don’t elect one captain unless they have confidence in you.  One also cannot be quarterback without their confidence while quarterbacking requires organizational and executive abilities.  In fact the Burroughs led team defeated all comers in their class and while yet high schoolers they played the varsity teams of Michigan and Notre Dame.  The Burroughs led MMA fought the U of M to a tie.

     As a result he was offered a football scholarship to the University.  He might well have become a football hero having an entirely different kind of life.  ERB inexplicably declined the U of M offer.  He offered some lame excuse that both his brothers had attended Yale and it was Yale or nothing for him.  Possible but hardly probable.  Most likely he felt comforatable leading the juvenile delinquents of MMA while he didn’t feel respectable enought to lead the Wolverines.

     Leaving for the Army as an enlisted man instead he and a few other ne’er-do-wells formed a group calling themselves The Might Have Seen Better Days Club.  You don’t have to be a Freudian to figure that one out.  So I think his history in these years can be explained by his negative orphan self-image.

     There is one very crucial event, the shame of which never left him, that figures into the Nemone story.  That was when in Idaho he gambled away his and Emma’s last forty dollars.  Certainly this was a turning point in his life.

     In Weyman’s Under The Red Robe the hero is a ne’er-do-well who has exhausted all his chances but one.  Named de Berrault the story opens when he is accused of using marked cards in a French game of the early seventeenth century.  “Marked Cards!’ are the opening words of Weyman’s novel.

     Indeed it would seem certain that Burroughs felt he had been cheated of his forty dollars.  In my experience of card games I’m certain he was.  De Berrault insists he didn’t use marked cards but that he used the mirror behind the player.  Perhaps Burroughs said to himself when reading this:  Yeah.  that must have been it.  At any rate thirty years later the incident was green in his mind and Why Not?

     While The City Of Gold is crtical of Nemone/Emma ERB could never forget that he had done Emma wrong in gambling away those forty dollars.  Perhaps as much as anything his shame required a separation.  Perhaps he thought Emma was too good for a ne’er-do-well like himself.

     And then there is this very interesting passage in Under The Red Robe  p. 208:

     I stood a moment speechless and disordered; stunned by her words, by my thoughts- so I have seen a man stand when he has lost all, his last at the table.  Then I turned to her, and for an instant I thought that my tale was told already.  I thought she had pierced my disguise, for her face was aghast, stricken with sudden fear.  Then I saw that she was not looking at me but beyond me, and I turned quickly and saw a servant hurrying from the house to us.

     Just as I admired ERB’s version of this device of looking past the intermediate person so he admired Weyman’s.

     The line ‘I stood there speechless and disordered, stunned by her words, by my thoughts- when I have seen a man stand when he has lost his all, his last, at the table…’ must have resonated with ERB from the time he had experienced the same emotion in 1903 as Emma waited for him upstairs.

     It becomes seen how ERB wove his various influences into his writing.  At this point I would like to bring up another very long novel that formed a backdrop to ERB’s writing in general.  the novel is the ten volume, five thousand page work of George W.M. Reynolds entitledThe Mysteries Of  London or alternatively, The Mysteries Of The Court Of London.  Modeled after The Mysteries Of Paris Reynolds lacks the lunacy of Eugene Sue but maintains a fantastic level of excitement all the way through.  ‘The Master Of Adventure’ may very well have learned his own mastery from the pages of Reynolds.

     The further one gets into ERB library the more clear things become but to really understand the man I highly recommend the reading of the Mysteries of Paris and London.

     Another almost irrelevant theme ERB takes up in this novel is the theme of the Grand Hunt or the Man Hunt.  The idea is no way original to ERB; he seems to be in reaction to it, repelled by it.  I can’t pretend to trace the story back to its origins but the theme has been used repeatedly in movies and on television.  The story is attributed to Richard Edward Connell who is credited with writing the original short story in 1924 for which he received the O. Henry Prize for that year, entitled The Most Dangerous Game.  Perhaps the story was original to him but it doesn’t seem likely.

     The story was made into a movie starring Joel McCrea in 1932.  Whether this movie was released early enough in the year to influence City Of Gold I don’t know, or, perhaps Burroughs saw an advance screening.  At any rate ERB gives the idea an extended treatment and prominent place in his novel, actually using it twice.

     If Connell did indeed orginate the story in 1924 which seems unlikely than Buroughs treatment comes as close to plagiarism or, perhaps, appropriation as any story could.  That he is in raction to the story condemning its implications is obvious.

     In his version Tarzan defeats the aims of the hunters by carrying their intended victim to safety while adding the filup that he too was an intended victim.  At the very least the Man Hunt is one of the least disguised influences in the corpus.  Extraordinary in that no ruckus was raised by his appropriation of the story.  Either ERB was not taken seriously or he led a charmed life.

b.

Should I stay, Or Should I Go?

     The crux of the story is Tarzan’s relationship with Nemone or, in other words, ERb’s relationship with Emma.  If the oeuvre is a guide ERB had already decided to throw his lot with Florence.  That seems clear from Tarzan And The Leopard Men.  City Of Gold then is mere procrastination.  One imagines that Florence was pestering him to break the news to Emma.  He would only muster the courage to do this at the end of 1933.  For now he seems torn and indecisive.

     The appearance is that Tarzan and Nemone would have gotten together but for two things.  The first was M’duze who seemed to exert some sort of hypnotic control over Nemone and the other was her pet lion, Belthar.

     M’duze was determined to maintain control over Nemone while Tarzan just left a bad taste in Belthar’s mouth.  It were well that Tarzan kept his distance.

     In point of fact Tarzan was a prisoner on parole.  He could easily have escaped or walked away but for two things: one was his fascination with Nemone and the other was that he was bound by oath to Gemnon to not escape.  In those days people had a sense of honor.

     ERB had constructed an interesting psychological situation in the female image of Nemone.  ERB has been really successful in portraying the Xy male construction of the Anima and Animus throughout the corpus but this is his first attempt as far as I know of constructing the XX of the female.

     This is always the qustion of whether he knew what he was doing.  This is a difficult question to answer but the enidence in the writing seems to imply he did.  The situation seems too perfect to be accidental.  As I’ve noted elsewhere when the chromosomal  division took place and sexual identities came into existence of the four possibilities, XXX and y, the male received an X and the y with the y making him male.  You can’t be male without the y, you can’t be female with it.  Boys are boys and girls are girls.  Now, this is not an ‘oh wow,  isn’t that interesting’ type of fact; the fact has consequences.

      For instance the whole burden of child bearing became the female’s portion.  I am not interested in all the different possibilites of how young are fertilized, incubated and born, yes, there are myriad possibilities but none of them apply to human beings but this one.  The method for human beings is impregnation in the womb, a nine month incubation period and then birth followed by a very long period of helpless development outside the womb.

     These simple facts determined the post partum relationship of the role of the male and the female.  When paternity was unknown the result was close knit communities held together by the offspring.  It was a question of interdependence whether Freud thought so or not.

     Physiologically  the male required the female for sexual release while the female was attracted by the y chromosome of the male, the penis envy for which Freud was castigated for uttering.  He wasn’t always right but he was right on this.

     While the female is XX chromosomally still one X is received from the mother which is of the passive ovum; the other X is received from the father’s mother through him in the form of an active X sperm.  The two Xes while both X are not identical.  If both were passive the female would be virtually immobile.

     Thus ERB posits the ovate X as M’duze who dominates Nemone’s Anima, which would be correct, while the male lion Belthar provides the activity of the X of the Animus.  Whether Burroughs thought this out or not, it works out.  Could be accidental, I suppose.

     Lacking the y chromosome which she formerly enjoyed during the sexless period the female has an uncontrollable  longing for the male or penis.  Thus Nemone and her desire for Tarzan.  Now, this is classic, no matter how indifferent or rude Tarzan is to her Nemone continues to have an intense longing, or love, for the Big Guy.

     This may or may not reflect Emma’s attitude toward Burroughs but Tarzan’s attitude toward Nemone certainly reflects Burroughs attitude toward Emma.  In point of fact, Emma’s fidelity is nothing short of marvelous.

     Also in Weyman’s Under The Red Robe which is an influence on City a subplot concerns the relations between a Mademoiselle de Cocheforet and the protagonist, de Berrault.  The lady distrusts the gentleman, as well she might as Cardinal Richelieu has suborned de Berrault to surreptitiously arrest her brother as a Huguenot.  De Berrault conceals his intentions but is found out when he arrests Mademoiselle’s brother.  Construing the arrest as a betrayal of her trust, which it wasn’t de Berrault forfeits the lady’s trust.

     Thus the novel combines the fateful card game with the forfeiture of Emma’s trust.  Having lost her trust ERB was never able to gain it back even though Emma continued with him loving, one supposes, the man despite his faults.  Quite possibly the situation between Tarzan and Nemone portrays the actual relationship between ERB and Emma in which as they were about to unite the past comes between them.

     Thus in Tarzan and Nemone’s first encounter Tarzan has fallen under Nemone’s spell being about to succumb when M’duze, or Nemone’s Anima, appears as though from the past, taps the floor with her staff breaking the spell while ordering Nemone from the room.  Belthar, Nemone’s Animus, rears up on his chains roaring and clawing the air at Tarzan.

     Thus both the Anima as represented by M’duze and the Animus as represented by Belthar interfere in Nemone’s attempt to realize her desire for Tarzan.

     The scene is repeated in reverse later in the novel as Nemone is about to succumb to Tarzan’s spell M’duze appears once again to disrupt the relationship.  Thus as in real life neither Burroughs nor Emma could get past that fatal card game.

     In the end then Tarzan presumes on Nemone’s desire too much.  She turns on him in the fury we all saw coming making him the object of the Grand Hunt.  One sees the influence of The Most Dangerous Game in ERB’s mind.  He is given a head start and then Belthar is released to pursue him.  Thus he is about to be destroyed by Nemone’s Animus.  ERB probably felt this way about Emma in real life.

     We have never seen the resourceful ape-man so defenceless and helpless before but now without his father’s knife to murder virtually defenseless lions Tarzan calmly awaits death after a game attempt to outrun Belthar.  He should have played dead;  we all know that story by now.

     Not to worry.  All during the novel a mysterious lion has been tracking the Big Bwana appearing at intervals in the story.  Perhaps some people were mystified as to who this lion was but not this writer, no sirree, Bob.  I knew it was Jad-Bal-Ja all along.  I was just surprised the Golden Lion hadn’t brought Nkima with him.

     Now just as Belthar rears to cut the Big Guy down to size Jad-Bal-Ja flashes past Tarzan to destroy Nemone’s lion.  As ERB says, Jad-Bal-Ja won because he was bigger.  Does that mean that ERB’s ego was bigger than Emma’s?

     The oeuvre needs a complete analysis of Tarzan and his relationship to animals for on one hand he is a beast.  The lion situation is complicated by the fact that originally there were to have been both lions and tigers in the series.  That would have changed the complexion of the stories.

     However after the magazine publication of Tarzan Of The Apes the readers created an uproar about the fact that there were no tigers in geographical Africa so Burroughs was forced to change tigers to lions for book publication.  I am unaware whether changes were made to the newspaper serialization of the story.

     The appearance is that Burroughs intended tigers to be villainous while lions were intended to be noble, as witness Jad-Bal-Ja.  In that situation most, if not all, the lions Tarzan killed would have been tigers.  Thus while as David Adams points out Tarzan kills a lion to put a seal on a sexual situation the very likely killing would have been a tiger.

     So the psychological aspect of the story gets skewed.  Just as Burroughs has insisted that Tarzan killed deer while there are no deer in Africa so his readers forced him to change Bara the deer to Bara the antelope by Tarzan The invincible.

     The climax of the story returns us again to the problem of lions in Burroughs.  As David Adams points our Tarzan kills a lion to put a seal on a sexual situation.   In this instance Tarzan is helpless but Jad-Bal-Ja his Anima substitute comes to his rescue which is the same as Tarzan killing Belthar.  Thus the killing of Belthar seals off Tarzan’s relationship to Nemone and ERB’s to Emma.

     I’m sure David Adams would take exception with me but I see Jad-Bal-Ja as an Anima figure of Tarzan/Burroughs while I see Belthar as the Anumus figure of Emma/Nemone.  I know both lions are males but the lion male or female is associatied with the goddess or Anima in Greek mythology.  A case can be made that the six gods and six goddesses are generalized archetypes  of the character types.

     Now, Jad-Bal-Ja came into the oeuvre at a critical time in the lives of ERB and Emma and at a critical juncture.  It is known that ERB walked out on Emma several times in the course of their marriage.  These instances are not well documented at this time.  It would appear that a very serious conflict in the marriage began at the time of Tarzan The Untamed through the period leading up to the writing of Tarzan And The Golden Lion.

     As Golden Lion opens Tarzan, Jane and Jack are returning from Pal-Ul-Don  from whence Tarzan has retrieved Jane.

     As I read the story there seems to be a certain coolness and distance between Tarzan and Jane on Tarzan’s part.  At this point the lion cub who will become Jad-Bal-Ja makes his appearance standing in the middle of the trail.  David’s sexual seal of the killed lion would be the cub’s mother who was accidentally killed by a Native who stumbled on the lioness and cub.  As a defense mechanism against Emme/Jane Tarzan/Burroughs adopts the cub as an Anima surrogate.

     In an email to me of 1/23/07 David makes these comments:

       Through the first nine Tarzan novels the hero gradually establishes the lion symbol as his own until in Tarzan And The Golden Lion he is completely aligned with his source of power in the merging of lion symbol and self/Jad-Bal-Ja.  Even though Jad is described as a glorified dog, this is only his personal devotion to the ape-man being explained in easy terms.  Tarzan himself always respects Jad, saying “A lion is always a lion.”  he is far from the domesticated ones in Cathne in purpose and spirit.

     My thinking is that David is right in that the lion symbol and self are united but not within the ego but separately as the Anima and Animus.  So what we have  is Anima/Jad-Bal-Ja and Animus/Tarzan. Tarzan is sort of doubly armed with two masculine sides with Jad-Bal-Ja being associated with the goddess and partaking in some way of her femininity.

     There wouldn’t be too much of a conflict between the female Anima and the Male Anima figure as ERB’s Anima was subsumed by the male fencing master Jules de Vac of The Outlaw Of Torn.   De Vac killed ERB/Norman’s Anima figure Maud and then assuming female attire lived with Norman in the attic of a house over the Thames for a fairly long period of time thus becoming a substitute Anima.

     Thus the anomaly of a male lion Anima is easily explained.  As a  symbol of the goddess Jad-Bal-Ja is, as it were, clothed in female attire as was De Vac.  Further Jad-Bal-Ja is always indifferent to Jane/Emma.  Jane has no real relationship with the Golden Lion.

     David once again:

     The mad queen of Cathne, Nemone, is an example of negative Anima, a feminine power corrupt and dangerous.  Her lion Belthar is the dark shadow opposite of Tarzan and Jad who are symbols of power and light and sun.  Her lion is treated as a dark god and is linked to Nemone’s own dark soul.  When Jad kills Belthar, Nemone kills herself because the source of her power is gone.  It is an archetypal case of light overcoming darkness.  The masculine power of light overcoming a dark feminine anima.

     In the general sense I have no problem with David’s analysis although I would argue that Belthar is Nemone’s Animus.  Nemone is playing the part of Circe in the myth of Odysseus while that story is the triumph of the male ego in freeing itself from matriarchal sexual thralldom.  This whole series of novels is related to the Odyssey.  So that, in that sense Tarzan is imprisoned by the charms of Nemone/Circe.  He is being emasculated, deprived of his will, by the feminine will by one might say, the maneater, Nemone.

     In fact Nemone as ruler of Cathne has emasculated the leonine male power.  As David Adams sagely observes:

     In Cathne lions are employed as domesticated animals for the purpose of pulling chariots, hunting and racing.  This is a reduction of the power of the lion symbol to the mundane, even to the point of being ridiculous.  It is a degradation and humiliaton of ERB’s ultimate symbol of power and virility.

     Yes, and that would be in keeping with the story of Circe who turned Odysseus’ crew into swine and would have Odysseus except that he had a pocketful of Moly, a charm to set Circe at naught.  Likewise the queen of the City of Gold of the Legends Of Charlemagne who enchanted the paladins of that king, except for one who then freed the others.

     So, Nemone had Tarzan at her mercy except for the strange situation of the lion of ERB’s Anima defeating the lion of Nemone’s Animus.

     Once this was done the charm of Nemone/Circe/Queen of the City of Gold was destroyed with the City of Gold being restored to male supremacy and Alextar restored to his rightful throne.  Things were then returned to their rightful order as in the domains of Circe and the Queen.  We are led to believe that a Utopian age begins.  This may be a slap at Wells and his Men Like Gods. 

Conclusion

     This review completes this very important series of five novels.  Obviously I consider the key novels to be Tarzan The Invincible, Tarzan And The Leopard Men and Tarzan And The Lion Man.  These novels are more directly concerned with ERB’s political and religious opinions.  A trilogy concerning ERB’s sexual problems could be made up of  Tarzan Triumphant, Leopard Men and City Of Gold bracketed by Invincible and Lion Man but Triumphant and City Of Gold appear to me to be more minor key than the other three.

     Nevertheless these five novels usually treated as the least significant of the series are the most crucial to the understanding of Burroughs while being very good stories in themselves.

     Excluding Tarzan And The Foreign Legion that is outside Burroughs’ psychological development, although a good story, ERB published only another three Tarzan novels in his lifetime and they were all decidedly inferior to that which preceded them, still good stories, but ERB’s concentration had been broken.  Tarzan’s Quest is the best of the last three but just as Lion Man ends with Burroughs’ dreams going up in flames so does Quest.  Perhaps eccentric best describes Tarzan And The Forbidden City.  The title says it all.  He was never to find salvation; the doors of the Sacred City remained closed to him.  Tarzan The Magnificent while having exciting episodes just doesn’t come together.

     Magnificent less Foreign Legion concluded the oeuvre until Castaways and Madman were discovered twenty years later.  However Burroughs himself chose not to publish those books so they must be an addendum to the series.  The two posthumous novels complete ERB’s psychological development being important in that respect for the student.

     Further his psychological development was brought to a head during the writing of these five novels.  In this tremendous struggle between ERB, the Communists and the Jews ERB was routed by the time he wrote Tarzan And The Lion Man.  He didn’t think his tactics and strategy through to the end.

     Thus ERB’s whole life was a prelude to the Gotterdamerung that ended as Tarzan fled the City of God.

     ERB’s whole life is a magnificent adventure that in itself would make a tremendous movie with the right and unfettered treatment.  It could the grandest of grand opera worhty of Mozart.  I’d like to see it; even better i’d like to write it.

 

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs #16

Tarzan And The City Of Gold

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Tall, magnificently proportioned, muscled more like Apollo than Hercules,

Garbed only in a narrow G-string of lion skin

With a lion’s tail depending before and behind,

He presented a splendid figure of  primitive manhood

That suggested more, perhaps, the demigod

Of the forest than it did man.

E.R. Burroughs

     This novel follows Tarzan And The Leopard Men in the sequence in which the novels were written.  Ballantine lists it as number sixteen while placing Leopard Men in eighteen in the sequence in which they were published.  In order to understand Burroughs’ psychological development however Leopard Men should be read before City Of Gold.

     The amazing use of symbolism in Leopard Men is continued in City Of Gold.  I am convinced that at this

The Swami

The Swami

time Burroughs was investigating the Indian religion of Vedantism.  Swami Prabhavananda had established a temple in Hollywood at the beginning of the decade which quickly took hold.  The symbolism would be employed by the Vedantists while Burroughs’ interest in symbolism itself was piqued.  Shortly after this novel ERB purchased a 1932 volume entitled The Scientific Dream Book And Dictionary Of Dream Symbols by one Johnathan B. Westerfield.  Thus ERB was investigating the psychological origin of his dreams.  The man was trying hard.

     It is clear that this sequence of novels is heavily influenced by Homer, especially by his Odyssey.  Homeric motifs run all through these five novels while as Doctor Hermes and David Adams have pointed out Burroughs uses the Athenian monetary unit, the drachma, as the currency of Cathne.

     A third probable source would be from the Legends Of Charlemagne volume of Bulfinch’s Mythology.  In the last Bulfinch tells of a City Of Gold in which an enchantress keeps the paladins of Charlemagne captive.  That story seems to be based on Homer’s story of Circe and Odysseus, or Ulysses in the Roman telling, so Burroughs combines both stories in his own enchantress, Nemone, of his City Of Gold.  One may take the City Of Gold to be the Sacred City of the Iliad.

     The rival kingdoms of Cathne and Athne- my spell check just pointed out to me that Athne respelled is Athen which is very close to Athene or Athens- have Greek sounding names reinforcing the Homeric connection.

     While the sexual symbolism of Leopard Men is dark and brooding placed in a swamp not unlike the Lernean Swamp of Greek mythology in which Heracles fought the furious female Hydra, The City Of Gold is much brighter and airier, more intellectual than the darker urges of the subconscious.

     Having now read many of the Tarzan novels four-five and even six times I am astonished at how well they maintain their freshness from reading to reading.  Rather than weary me, each reading is a fresh experience that opens a whole new vista of possibilities.  The more I seem to understand of what I’m reading the more signficance the words have as the story seems to rise from the page to form concrete living images, as it were.

     In this novel expecially I am impressed by the pacing, the effort put into preparing the scenes and the masterly execution in which each word assumes its independent value almost as though ERB had put as much care into word selection as, say, the poet Tennyson.  Of course we all know ERB read Tennyson as well as other verse and poetry while also being familiar with song lyrics.  Thus while writing prose he is able to maintain a poetic intensity.

     The opening scene is an excellent example of his skill.  Tarzan is out hunting when he is spotted by some shiftas.  He’s in Ethiopia at the end of the rainy season.  We aren’t told why he is there but he has commanded Nkima and Jad-Bal-Ja to stay home.  As a corollary, just before he leaves Emma two years later he will take a solo vacation to the mountains of Arizona.  The spatial arrangement conveyed in this scene is that of Tarzan between the shiftas and the prey he is hunting.  While he is silently stalking the prey the shiftas are more noisily stalking him.  The movement of the shiftas which can be seen by the prey but not by Tarzan who has his back to them is caught by the prey who looks past Tarzan to the shiftas.  Tarzan noticing the prey looking beyond him also looks back to spot the shiftas stalking him.

     The spatial concepts involved are astonishing while three views of time are also evident.  I only picked up on this aspect with my fifth reading.  My interest was thus piqued and heightened so that the novel took on an entirely new aspect.  The scene as written is so well paced and spaced that it made a vignette I’m sure I shall never forget, while I now long to duplicate such a scene in my own writing.

     The patient lulling slow pace of Tarzan’s hunt was now broken.  As Tarzan’s quarry fled, the action between Tarzan and the shiftas became fast, furious and frenzied, while the sexual symbolism bursts into one’s consciousness.

     As the shiftas bear down upon him Tarzan realizes that he cannot escape by running.  If he could have he would have because as Burrughs never tires of noting there is no disgrace in running from a force majeure.  Instead Tarzan shot arrows among the the shiftas.  Than as a shifta bore down on him lance leveled:

There could be no retreat for Tarzan; there could be no sidestepping to avoid the thrust, for a step to either side would have carried him in front of one of the other horsemen.  He had but a slender hope for survival, and that hope forlorn though it appeared, he seized upon with the celerity, strength and agility that make Tarzan Tarzan.  Slipping his bow string about his neck after his final shot, he struck up the point of the menacing weapon of his antagonist, and grasping the man’s arm swung himself to the horse’s back behind the rider.

     Abilities like that make Tarzan Tarzan and I’m sure such a feat could be done in reality as in the imagination although possibly not if Tarzan had had the bunchy muscles of the professional strongman.  Smooth ones flowing beneath the skin like molten metal are undoubtedly a prerequisite.

     Dispatching the shifta Tarzan is now symbolically seated on a horse.  The horse directly plunges into a river to swim to the other side.  In mid-stream the horse and rider are attacked by a crocodile that Tarzan kills or disables.  Emerging from the river Tarzan gallops into a forest where he abandons the horse for the security of the trees.

     There in a short passage we have a wealth of symbolism that tells in a few paragraphs what ERB could have developed in many chapter if told in straight prose.

     The horse is a symbol of the female.  Thus Tarzan as Animus is symbolically united with his Anima.  the horse plunges into the river which is also a female symbol representing the waters of the unconscious.  Still mounted Tarzan is in the conscious sphere above water while the horse is submerged in the subconscious.  The crocodile also a female symbol representing the greedy, devouring, emasculating aspect of the female attacks.  The horse turns upstream in an attempt to flee the croc.  Tarzan strings his bow firing an arrow, as a masculine symbol, into the  crocodile’s mouth disabling it thus escaping the disabling aspect of the feminine while with strange violence sending the arrow down the throat.  One has to think about these things.

     The horse scrambles up on the opposite bank signifying a change in life, then gallaps into the forst of the subconscious where one goes in search of oneself.  The forest here is the same as all those underground mazes in Burrough’s corpus.

     Once in the forest Tarzan abandons the horse, or Anima for the security of the trees where he is above it all.  Apparently there is a deep cleavage between his Animus and Anima.  Now begins a very strange encounter.  Burroughs apparently felt he left something of himself on the other side of the river so he goes back for it.

     Coming upon the camp of the shiftas he notices that they have a bound captive.  As this appears to be what he returned for one can only speculate that the bound captive is an aspect of himself.  Perhaps the captive represents his marriage to Emma in which he is in the bonds of matrimony wishing to escape them.  Tarzan takes action.  At this point Burroughs offers this rather remarkable passage describing the Ape-Man.  p. 15:

It was difficult for Tarzan to think of himself as a man, and his psychology was more often that of the wild beast than the human, nor was he particularly proud of his species.  While he appreciated the intellectual superiority of man over other creatures, he harbored contempt for him because he had wasted the greater part of his inheritance.  To Tarzan, as to many other created things, contentment is the highest ultimate goal of achievement, health and culture the principal avenues along which man may approach this goal.  With scorn the ape-man viewed the overwhelming majority of mankind which was wanting in one essential or the other, when not wanting in both.  He saw the greed, the selfishness, the cowardice, and the cruelty of man; and, in view of man’s vaunted mentality, he knew that these characteristics  placed man upon a lower spiritual scale than the beasts, while barring him eternally from the goal of contentment.

     In the above quote ERB outlines the central problem of mankind.  In the evolution of mankind from beast to homo sapiens the much vaunted mentality of HS has failed to make the transition from the pure mentality of the beast to that of, essentially, the god.  In orther words his origins are dragging him back as he tries to make the leap to the next stage of evolution and development.

     While having a godlike intelligence rather than using it to elevate himself above primal desires as the direction of the nineteenth century was going, in the early twentieth century Freud undercut the drive to perfection dragging mankind back down to primal desires.  This is Freud’s great crime for which he should be burned in his effigy of Satan once a year in a great world wide holiday.  Thus as Man uses his intelligence to get at the root of things, and I think we’re very close to understanding all, Man’s primal desires lapsing back into the ‘unconscious’ of Freud, and make no mistake the current conception of the unconscious is of Freuds’ personal devising, devise even more fiendish ways of evil as that knowledge increases.  Thus rather than aspiring toward a spiritual contentment Man chooses to give in to desires that lower him beneath the hyena.

     Thus Tarzan, who has attained spiritual contentment, and become godlike, looks with scorn and contempt on the humanity of his fellows preferring to think of himself as a ‘spiritually pure’ beast.

     While this attitude is a theme throughout the oeuvre and the corpus as a whole perhaps this rant was sharpened by the developing difficulties at MGM.  Shortly after this was written Tarzan, The Ape Man hit the screens scrambling ERB’s vision of Tarzan forever.  The screen Tarzan has no intellect.  In the movie Tarzan’s Desert Adventure Boy even has to read Jane’s letter to him.

     On his way to the shifta camp the ever present Numa is between him and the desperadoes.  Taking to the trees of the forest to pass over Numa he spots a strangely garbed man in the shifta camp.  Still smarting because he lost his quarry and operating on the primitive logic that since the shiftas had deprived him of dinner it would only be right to deprive them of something they wanted, he decides to free the captive.

     He was about to fail in his attempt when the ever present Numa saves his skin by attacking the shifta camp.  In the confusion Tarzan and the prisoner escape.  The man turns out to be an Athnean named Valthor.  Having escaped they must put up for the night.  Sheeta the panther is abroad.  As David Adams is wont to point out, for Burrough Sheeta is a sexual symbol, so the next scene has strong homoerotic overtones.

     The question is who does Valthor represent.  He is curiously vague in personality.  As Burroughs was obsessed with the Jekyll and Hyde notion at this time I suspect that Valthor is an aspect of Burroughs’ own personality with some sort of relation to Tarzan as Jekyll to Hyde.  Valthor’s life is saved as Sheeta leaps for him so that one feels he may be related in some way to Stanley Obroski, another alter ego of Tarzan, who will actually die in the succeeding novel, Tarzan And The Lion Man.

     In this novel, in putting up for the night, Tarzan with his superior junglecraft, finds a tree where two horizontal branches fork.  He cuts some smaller limbs to form a pallet for himself for the night.  He had eaten but he is unconcerned whether the able bodied Valthor has eaten or not.  Tarzan does not hunt for other men.  If he hadn’t already eaten he would have made a kill and shared the abundance.

     Valthor lies down on the ground.  Sheeta is watching silently.  So silently even Tarzan does not hear him breathe, until readying himself to springs, he quietly brushed a leaf or two.  Tarzan hears for his ears are not as yours or mine.  As Sheeta launches himself on Valthor Tarzan shouts a warning while rolling from the pallet to descend on Sheeta’s back.

     Now, this scene replicates a similar scene in Beasts Of Tarzan when Tarzan leaps on Sheeta’s back in midair as she was about to leap on the ape, Akut.  I hadn’t thought of homoerotic overtones between Akut and Tarzan but they may be there.  It may be signficant that Akut later became the mentor of young Jack Clayton otherwise known as Korak The Killer.

     In the instance of Akut, the ape became sort of a vassal of Tarzan, while in this story Tarzan and Valthor become fast friends although the relationship is one of superior to inferior- Batman to Robin.  After killing Sheeta, Tarzan takes a more motherly attitude toward Valthor, making a bed for him in the tree because he knew Numa was prowling the forest.  That undoubtedly he knew that before was he leaving Valthor for Numa?

     They awoke in the morning.  p. 26:

Nearby, the other man sat up and looked about him.  His eyes met Tarzan’s and he smiled and nodded.  For the first time the ape-man had an opportunity to examine his new acquaintance by daylight.  The man had removed his single garment for the night, covering himself with leaves and branches.  Now as he arose, his only garment was a G-string and Tarzan saw six feet of well muscled, well proportioned body topped by a head that seemed to bespeak breeding and intelligence.  The wild beast in Tarzan looked into the brown eyes of the stranger and was staisfied that here was one who might be trusted.

     Not exactly a description of love at first sight but a definite tinge of homoeroticism.  Brown eyes.  In fact Tarzan and Valthor become fast friends.  Quickly learning each other’s language by the point and name system, or at least, Tarzan learning Valthor’s language, they are soon chatting away amiably.

     Valthor comes from the mountains but after they wander around for a week he admits he is lost.  Tarzan gets the general direction then setting out in a bee line.  Their goal is the huge extinct volcano, Xarator, which they soon locate.  Just as Leopard Men was cast in the erotic swamps of the feminine as Old Timer lusted and panted after Kali Bwana so The City Of Gold  is located in a valley high in the mountains where heaven and earth meet and the cold incisive intellect works best.  Tarzan is not going to lust; like brave Ulysses he is going to resist the sexual blandishments of his Circe, Nemone.

     Both City Of Gold and Tarzan Triumphant take place near or in volcanos so the volcano must link the two stories.  The extent of emotion involved in this one is indicated by the atmospheric conditions as the two men enter the valley.  Compare this scene with that of Tarzan The Invincible when Tarzan and La leave Opar.  the symbolism is ferocious.

     The scene is set in the mountains of Ethiopa.  The rainy season is about to end but the last and most furious storm of the season bursts on the two.  It seems certain here that Valthor is another aspect of Burroughs’ Animus in the Jekyll-Hyde sense.  In this case the two are not so widely divergent as Jekyll and Hyde but are closer in aspects .  Tarzan is still definitely superior and Valthor inferior.

     Athne and Cathne are twin cities in the valley but they have to pass through Cathne- The City Of Gold which is to say perfection- to get to Athne.  Athneans are Elephant men while Cathneans are Lion Men.  As the two begin to cross the valley the great storm breaks.  The storm no doubt symbolizes that storm feared by Burroughs of actually separating himself from Emma, certainly one of the most difficult thing he would ever have to do.

     The separation must have been terrific internal trauma so that ERB kept putting it off rather than face it.  One imagines that as in a situation like this Florence was continually asking him when he was going to tell Emma.  It would be another two years before he could force himself to make the break.  It is significant that just before he left he took a leave of absence from Emma returning to Arizona where, as here, he stayed in the mountains, the White Mountains of the Apaches.  Thus his time in the Army must have had more significance for him than we credit.  He must have thought, as miserable as he appeared to be, that those were the happiest days of his life.

     In Cathne the rains came down.  This was the mother of all storms.  Between the thunder, lightning and literal sheets of rain the two were severed from all reality.  They were walking ankle deep along the road.  Once again they have to cross a stream.  ERB has seen such a stream in Arizona, so this whole situation seems to be recalled by his Army days.  Actually the nine months he spent in Arizona was a fairly rainy period of fourteen inches.  In February 1897, I believe, four and half inches fell probably in one stormy period.  ERB records a stream that became a raging torrent in his last Western novel.  To some extent then he was writing from experience but already thinking of the good old days before he married.

     As hard as it was raining in Cathne the river should have been unfordable but art has its demands.

     Valthor knowing the ford begins to lead Tarzan across.  He gets too far ahead.  Tarzan in his uncertainty misses a step being swept away by the flood.  He is now in the possession of the waters of the feminine, that is, his female problems, just barely able to get his breath.  He is swept from side to side by the violent action of the waters, tumbled head over heels, but he keeps his mental presence.  There is a great waterfall ahead of him which threatens certain death.  The symbolism should be clear.  In a last ditch effort Tarzan catches a rock hauling himself from the water, if I am correct, on the same side of the river, in other words, Emma.  He doesn’t cross which is symbolically important.  Refer that back to the earlier crossing in which he actually crosses but then returns.

     Gathering his senses about him he sees some lights, going to investgate.  He unwittingly stumbles into Nemone’s garden.  Out of the frying pan, into the fire so to speak.

     Brave Ulysses has found his Circe.

B1

     The scent of the big cats fills this book.  Already Sheeta and Numa have had nearly equal billing with Tarzan and Valthor; now lions are given prominence.  Now Tarzan emerges from the flood, which symbolizes a major life change, into the land of lions and lion worship.  the ownership of lions is a mark of distinction in Cathne, Cahtnean chariots are even drawn by lions which brings to mind the chariots of goddesses like Cybele, Harmonia and Cadmus.  Nemone will promise to reward Tarzan with three hundred lions, apparently an incredible number making him the top Lion Man.  Remember the next novel Tarzan And The Lion Man will continue the theme.

     Continuing an old theme from Tarzan And The Golden Lion a lion is even the god of Cathne.  The symbol of Nemone’s Animus is a great black maned male lion named Belthar.  The novel will devolve into a battle between Nemone’s lion, Belthar, and Tarzan’s lion, Jad-Bal-Ja.  Also continuing an old device employed in Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar by the jewels and in Tarzan And The Ant Men by Tarzan’s locket this story is unified by the image of a great lion drawing ever nearer to Tarzan.  So amid all these lions is the true Lion Man, Tarzan’s personal lion.  His own guardian animal.

     It does seem clear that ERB associates the big cats with sexuality.

     ERB is building this story very carefully with great attention to spacing and pacing.  Captured by the

Gordon Scott As Tarzan

Gordon Scott As Tarzan

Cathneans ERB takes care to ingratiate the Big Bwana with the troops.  He has Tarzan and the Cathnean soldiers enter into a spirit of camaraderie as he introduces them to and instructs them in the use of the bow.  Nemone is instroduced but seems to take little notice of the Big Guy condemning him to fight in the arena.

     Taken to a prison cell he and we are introduced at some length and in some detail to a character named Phobeg.  Phobeg is billed as the strongest man in Cathne.

     ERB devotes an amazing amount of space to his confrontation between Phobeg and Tarzan.  His development of such a minor character is unusual.  I think what we have here is a confrontation between Tarzan and the actual man who inspired Burroughs to create Tarzan, the man who was the physical basis of the Lion Man.  Phobeg can be no other than the first important body builder in the world- The Great Sandow.  Just as in Tarzan The Magnificent Burroughs takes care to indicate that Tarzan has now replaced H.M. Stanley as the symbol of Africa, so here he puts down ‘the strongest man in the world’ in favor of his hero.

     Sandow (1867-1925) had died a few years earlier.  While other muscle men had replaced Sandow, most notably Charles Atlas, Burroughs was still obsessed by the man he had seen at the Columbian Expo of 1893.  It would seem certain that ERB occasionally picked up a copy of Physical Culture Magazine to keep up on the latest builds.  He couldn’t have missed the memorial copy devoted to Sandow, the greatest and still the greatest of the body builders.  The award given to Mr. Olympia is called the Sandow.

     While bowled over by the strongman, and strongmen, ERB was always offended by the bunchy muscles created by body building.  he repeatedly makes allusions to strongmen throughout the corpus while Tarzan himself is both the antithesis and the perfection of the strongman.  That is why Tarzan has smooth muscles flowing like molten metal beneath his skin while in this case Phobeg as a Sandow surrogate has the knotted muscles of the body builder.

     If Burroughs found Sandow’s build offensive he would have gone apoplectic at the most recent champions who seems to have developed musculature as far as it can go.  Unlike builders like Charles Atlas, Gordon Scott or Arnold Schwarzenegger who aspired to the Apolline figure, Ronnie Coleman and his successor Jay Cutler have opted for muscle upon muscle until there  is nothing but muscle with no attention to a human shape.  As an example check out Jay Cutler the current Mr. Olympia and holder of the Sandow at www.emusclemag.com.  This guy is only 5’9″ but bulks up at 320 lbs., paring down to 275 for performance.  And that is literally all muscle.  One look at Cutler and ERB would have been foaming at the mouth

     Just as Sandow was billed as the strongest man in the world, so Phobeg is billed as the strongest man in

Jay Cutler In Full Pump

Jay Cutler In Full Pump

Cathne.  ERB makes him a braggart in relation to Tarzan but if he was the strongest man in Cathne he had little reason to respect Tarzan’s physique which was more like ‘Apollo than Hercules.’  Tarzan’s strength though greater than Phobeg’s was disguised.

     At they are to fight each other to the death in the arena this allows Burroughs to introduce another of his interests which may be related, that of professional wrestling.  Burroughs had Tarzan jokingly suggest that they stage the fight much as professional wrestlers.  Burroughs who still attended the matches was disgusted becasue the matches were pure entertainment, something he should have applauded.  Then as now the professional wrestling matches were staged.  Professional wrestling then as now has more to do with entertainment than sport.  Either you can get caught up in the fun and drama or you can’t.  ERB obviously did although as he still thought of the shows as wrestling he felt put upon.

     After several pages of Phobeg’s bragging and Tarzan’s false humility the ‘really big shoo’ begins.  Tarzan and Phobeg are the last act on the program and they would have been a difficult act to follow.

     ERB must have loved this part as the lenghty description of the gambling taking place is many times more detailed that he usually is.  Whether the gambling aspect went on at the wrestling matches he attended or not, I don’t know.  The odds naturally are for Phobeg, whose Cathnean reputation is immense and accurate as concerns the past.  Everyone expects the inveterate gambler Nemone to bet on the sure thing as was her custom.  They hedged their bets when they could at fantastic odds.  Nemone then surprised them by betting on Tarzan.  Nearly bankrupted the whole coterie of Lion Men.

     Tarzan wins of course but refusing to kill Phobeg he instead does his trademark thing lifting Phobeg above his head and tossing him into the stands at Nemone’s feet.  Now that is one hard act to follow.

     Having now won his liberty, a lion man named Gemnon is assigned custodian of Tarzan taking him under his wing.  Up to this point there seems to be no reference to contemporary affairs except for Sandow and wrestling.  At this point ERB displays a numerous and surprising set of literary references.

Go To Tarzan And The City Of Gold part two. 

 

 

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#18  Tarzan And The Lion Man

Part 6

by

R.E. Prindle

First published on the ezine, ERBzine

The Center Of The Circle

 

     Burroughs does a remarkable thing in this ring that clearly shows the Greek classical influence per Erling Holtsmark in his Tarzan And Tradition.   ERB disolves his story and cast of characters after the last Bansuto attack.  The cast is dispersed in several directions but ERB will deliver them all to Omwamwi Falls as he begins the three right hand rings:  3-2-1

     In fact this does follow the Homeric tradition.  The story of the Trojan Wars was actually a massive story of which only three parts survive, the Iliad, which concerns the central part of the epic and th two Returns, The Odyssey and The Oresteia.  All the rest has been lost or survives only in fragments such as ‘The Judgement Of Paris.”  Originally the epic was thousands of pages long.  There were undoubtedly few scholars who had ever read the story in its entirety and fewer still who understood it.

     It seems incredible that a very young ERB could have grasped the structure so completely while seeming to understand it so thoroughly.  Holtsmark quotes ERB as saying that he was rereading Plutarch’s Lives in 1923 when he discovered that Numa was the name of a Roman emperor, actually one of the Republican kings,  To that point he had believed that he had made up the name.

     Thus we learn that ERB did some rereading and his subconscious supplied material.  He could have, it is plausible, read the Iliad and Odyssey a number of times over his life.  Along with other classical reading the basic method was established in his subconscious which he was able to consciously manipulate.

     The Trojan War was the first of the three great sprawling European epics, unmatched in any other literatrue.   The second was the Arthurian Saga also huge, sprawling through many thousands of pages and many different variations.  The story has its roots in Greek mythology as well as in the Christian ethos.  The Lancelot-Grail alone is several thousand pages.  Burroughs doesn’t seem to have been much concerned with it.  Indeed, most of it would have been untranslated in his time thus being unavailable to him.

     The third great cycle was the strange nineteenth century English pursuit of the Grail in the search for the source of the Nile.  In my estimation a rather peculiar obsession.  This story too occupies several thousands of pages as all the participants recorded their efforts in copious detail.  Livingston, Stanley, Burton, Baker and Speke have written magnficent narratives.  Speke walking the Nile North after just having discovered the source actually ran into Baker following the Nile South.  A remarkable accidental encounter that goes unnoticed.  The best overview and history of the quest is Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile of 1960.  He provides an adequate background for these modern knights in seach of an unlikely Grail.  The Tarzan oeuvre might be indluded as a fourth cycle based on cycles one and three.

     The first and third epics then involved ERB intimately.  The Tarzan series is based on the Africa of the Nile Quest while framed in the literary construction of the first.

     Burroughs then dissolves his story after the Bansuto attack then telling the story of the several participants on the way to Omwamwi Falls in the manner of the Homeric Returns.  He then reassembles them less Obroski at the Omwamwi or Murchison Falls on the Nile.  Thus the river cascading from the plateau is actually the Nile.  What he calls the Thames on the plateau of the City of God must be indeed a substantial stream.

     We have already dealt with the fate of Stanley Obroski and Tarzan.  After the last Bansuto attack the Arabs agreed to take the midnight to six watch.  During the night they folded their tents and silently stole away taking Rhonda, Naomi and the map with them.

     Orman decides to go off in pursuit of them alone.  Bill West convinces him to take himself along so the two abandon the safari to pursue the girls and Arabs.

     Tarzan neutralizes the Bansuto by having them promise to be kind to Whites so the remaining safari members are able to somehow get their trucks and equpment to the Falls unmolested,  that leaves the girls, the Arabs and Orman and West.

     After leaving Obroski shivering with fright in a tree Tarzan comes upon Orman and West as they are being attacked by a lion.  Plummeting from the convenient tree Tarzan dispatches the lion, immediately disappearing back into his tree.   This is the first incident of the cast mistaking Tarzan for Obroski.  I happen to think Burroughs handles this confusion extremely well.  After all, Burroughs has firmly established Obroski’s cowardice with the safari members.

     Orman and West’s astonishment at the seeming Obroski feat is very genuine.  Later when Tarzan supplies them with a buck while translating Arabic from Atewy their astonishment can’t be more complete.  Very effectively handled.  Having supplied them with food Tarzan points them in the right direction and gets them started with a swift kick so that leaves the Arabs and the girls to account for.  This also begins the comparison of the qualities of Rhonda and Naomi.

     The Arabs have the map to the valley of diamonds that they believe is genuine and indeed it is.  Unable to read English, the language of the map, they make promises of freedom to gain the cooperation of the girls.  Rhonda scoffs at the genuineness of the map believing it a movie prop.  However they can locate their position according to the landmarks provided by the map.  Astonishingly they are able to locate all the landmarks which lead them to the Omwamwi Falls.

     Naomi accepts her captivity while Rhonda plans escape.  She effects this by saddling a couple ponies at night  while driving the rest of the herd off.  This episode is also well handled and quite believable given that this is a fantasy novel.  The net result is that Naomi is recaptured while Rhonda makes it to the falls where the story is forwarded by her capture by the Apes of God.  Another little joke, I presume.

     Following both the map and Rhonda the Arabs and Naomi arrive at the Falls.  The action then finishes the parallel story to Tarzan and Obroski  of the girls and begins the right second ring story of The City Of God.  This is a magnificent story full of many twists and surprises.  In our day this stuff has been used over and over so that the imaginative feat is diluted or lost.  If one places one’s imagination back in 1933 one can marvel at Burroughs; ingenuity while seeing how disappointed ERB was that the novel fell flat.  Such is life.

Part 2 Tarzan And The Lion Man

 

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#18 Tarzan And The Lion Man

Part 2 of 10 parts

by R.E. Prindle

Doubles And Insanity

First published on the ezine- ERBzine

 

Sometimes I feel like I’m dreaming.

-Tarzan

Penguin Dictionary Of Symbols p. 306

Doubles:  In every culture artists have depicted double-headed creatures, SERPENTS, DRAGONS, BIRDS, LIONS, BEARS and so on.  This is due neither to mere love of ornamentation nor to some Manichean influence, the creatures so depicted all have a bipolarity, both benign and malign, and this is described in their individual entries in this dictionary.  It is very likely that it is this double aspect of the live creature which is suggested by its depiction with two heads. For example, the lions strength symboizes both sovereign power and a consuming lust, whether it be for justice, or for the exercise of absolute authroity in a bloodthirsty tyrant.  Similarly, ribbons or wreaths depicted round a person’s head may symbolize, if they form a CLOSED circle, confinement in difficulty and misfortune, but if broken, release.

Sometimes duplication serves merely to re enforce and redouble the meaning attached to one of the POLES of the symbol.

Traditonal religions generally thought of the soul as being the double of the living owner, able to leave the body at death, in dreams or through magical practices, and to return to the same or some other body.  Mankind thus provided its own self-portrait in duplicate.  In any case, instances of hysterical or schizophrenic duplication of personality are well known to psychotherapy.

German Romanticism endowed this notion of a person’s double (Doppelganger)  with tragic and fatal overtones….It may sometimes be our complement, but it is more often the foe with whom we are lured to fight….In some ancient traditons, meeting one’s double is an unlucky occurrence, and is sometimes even a presage of death.

—————

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Lion Man is overwhelmingly a novel of doubles or duplicity.  The number of things doubled is bewildering.  I deal only with the most obvious here.  The reason Burroughs concentrates on doubling, I believe is because he discovered the double meaning of the terms of the contract he signed with MGM.  He was stunned by the duplicity.

On p. 154 Burroughs comments on duplicity such as he found at MGM.  Remember he names them BO or Stinky studios in the novel.

Tarzan was suspicious.  He saw a trap, he saw duplicity in every thing conceived by the mind of man.

Thus having been betrayed Burroughs is now alert seeing doubling or duplicitness everywhere.

St. John, the illustrator of the book also picked up on the aspect of doubling.  This novel was so extremely important to Burroughs, he even issued it on his birthday, September 1st, 1934, that he asked St. John for something different for a jacket illustration.  St. John concentrated on the Obraoski/Tarzan doubling, producing a Janus like cameo of Tarzan/Obroski facing in opposte directions.  As in the Penguin definition representing both characters of the Lion Men Tarzan and Obroski.

In this case the two faces represent the earlier cowardly Bureroughs who has to die and the strong masterly Tarzan figure Burroughs wishes to be.

Thus, before considering the story it would be fruitful to examine ERB’s use of doubling and confusion of reality, or in other words craziness, madness or insanity.

It is obvious that when ERB is passing rhough a period of extreme stress Tarzan loses his memory and/or doubles- that is to say splits his personality in a hysterical or schizophrenic way.  At this point in his life Burroughs is enduring the stress of sexual conflict – the change in affections from Emma to Florence- as well as the extreme stress of having lost control of his creation and actual alter ego to MGM as representatives of his Judaeo-Communist enemies.  In point of fact, as Burroughs may have realized, the battle, even the war, was lost.  As MGM’s 1936 movie Tarzan Escapes, indicates Tarzan/Burroughs had been captured.  Hence the tenuous grasp on sanity in this book.

In Burroughs’ mind and in fact he had been trapped by duplicity, itself a form of doubling.  When Tarzan, having climbed the Stairway To Heaven finds the front door standing open he scents a trap but as his intention was to enter anyway he enters.  He is now only in the antechamber of fate, he could still back out.  He notices six doors of which Door #3 is standing open.  He does try the other five doors but they are locked.  Entering Door #3 he begins the descent down a dark stairwell.  He encounters another door.  Rather than checking the door first he merely enters to have the door click shut behind him.  The wall is smooth, there is now no way out.

This scene may well be a fictionalized account of his negotiations with MGM.  The Studio, perhaps representing Door #3 was offering him a contract which no other studio, doors 1,2,4,,5,6 was willing to do.  Granted not everyone can spot a sterling opportunity that is staring them in the face but it does seem odd that no other studio was interested in a proven character.  After all Twentieth Century-Fox was working Charlie Chan movies hard and doing well.  But all doors were closed to Burroughs/Tarzan except Door #3, MGM.  Not a bad thing on the surface of it as MGM was far and away the best studio in Hollywood.

So Burroughs entered into negotiations with MGM in the same manner as Tarzan descended the dark staircase in which he couldn’t see very well, i.e. Burroughs didn’t understand the clauses.  Like Tarzan ERB didn’t exercise caution and while the door snapped shut trapping Tarzan so Burroughs signed the contract which he represented as the prison Tarzan found himself in.

The reader may find the above farfetched but remember the first third of the story is an account of MGM’s Trader Horn expedition that he ridicules.  This book is about MGM.

Before dealing with the main doubles of the story let’s consider the story within the story- a form of doubling itself.  We have God on Earth doubling God in Heaven.  This becomes the source of many jokes.  Stress or no stress Burroughs doesn’t lose his sense of humor.  God’s castle is known as Heaven thus doubling Heaven.  The Stairway to Heaven doubles Jacob’s Ladder thus calling to mind the biblical story.  Tarzan then doubles Jacob.  That’s just part of sly old Burroughs’s humor.

God himself has created a parallel universe doubling England, London and the Thames.  Thus the gorilla plateau is called England while they live in London on the Thames River.  Thus a doubling of Africa and an island off the coast of Europe.

Just as God in Heaven in the biblical story created Man so God in this story has hybridized gorillas into a new species of gorilla men.  The hybrid gorillas are doubles of both gorillas and men while God is a double of man and Gorilla.

In this dizzying array of doubles the gorillas are not just a doubling of men but a doubling of the fifteenth century court of Henry VIII of England.  They have been altered by the use of deathless genes  or, atually, DNA, which was unknown to Burroughs at the time but the nature of which he dimly perceives.  The DNA has been inserted or spliced into the genes of the gorillas, thus the gorilla Henry VIII is actually, Henry VIII.  The Fifteenth century is doubled in the twentieth century while the political scene of the twentieth duplicates that of the fifteenth.  ERB may here be influenced by Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stanger with his notion of ascending and descending staircases of time.

During this phase of the story within the story Tarzan is actually himself while posing as, or doubling, Stanley Obroski thus actually being self contained twins; in other words the personality formerly split between he and Stanley Obroski is reunited with Tarzan dominant.  Thus Tarzan redeems Burroughs’ former shamed self.  At this moment Stanley is dying of fever and when he does the double disappears leaving Tarzan or Burroughs then undivided.  The dead body of Obroski is shipped back to the States while Tarzan remains in the jungle.

The story within the story is a stunning achievement whose genius has gone unrecognized.

b.

The most obvious examples of doubling is in the main characters.  As incredible as it may seem not only are Tarzan and Stanley Obroski so close they can’t be told apart but so are the female leads Naomi Madison and Rhonda Terry.

I’m sure there are doubles I’m missing here but even Tom Orman, the Dirctor, is a double of himself when he’s under the influence of alcohol.  Drunk he becomes a different Tom Orman than when sober.  Obroski himself is two people.  An errant coward when he has time to think he become ferociously brave when his back is against the wall and there is no time for reflection.

Naomi Madison who has become a prima donna or an artiste was at one time a waitress in a cheap restaurant which role she is forced to assume again which is another form of doubling.  In this joke Naomi is an insult to Irving Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, whose early career is duplicated.

Also this movie Tarzan is a doubling of the literary Tarzan so both Obroski and Tarzan are doubles of Johnny Weissmuller who played the MGM Tarzan.  As Burroughs suggests in this novel he was half out of his mind from the terrific stresses.  The stress did produce however a terrific novel.

It would seem that Burroughs was Tarzan and Obroski as twin aspects of his own Animus while Naomi and Rhonda represented the twin aspects of his Anima.  Naomi obviously represents Emma while Rhonda is an extension of La of Opar combined with Florence.  Naomi disappears from the story apparently replaced by Balza, The Golden Girl, while Burroughs marries Rhonda to Orman.

As regards the doubling of Tarzan who is actually a double of Burroughs himself, Bibliophile David Adams has emphasized that Tarzan usually views from above so that it might be the time to look into this aspect of the character.  In Lion Man Obroski is captured and held prisoner by Rungula, chief of the Bansuto.  this whole scene of Obroski with the Bansuto is one of the numerous variations of the theme of Burroughs humiliation by John the Bully.

Burroughs was plagued with the dream, as he notes the dream frequent among dreamers, of going naked in public.  It is a frequent dream because multitudes of people have suffered similar humiliation as his.

ERB has Obroski stand before Rungula who demands his clothes, in other words his defensive and offensive armor, that without which Obroski is exposed defenseless to the world, he loses his ‘front.’  John had symbolically stripped young ERB.  Burrughs describes his humiliation in excruciating detail as Obroski does a virtual striptease.  First his shirt on down until Burroughs makes a joke of his gaily printed boxer shorts.  While the Bansuto would not have understood the signficance of the shorts ERB takes a certain pleasure in humiliating himself further.  To cover rhis nakedness Obroski pleads for the proverbial fig leaf and is given a skimpy dirty g-string.  Thus when he is led out for torture he fights the Bansuto naked but in a Tarzan guise.  Heck, Tarzan, who is not civilized in the jungle, walks around naked anyway.  Although the natives themselves are naked Obroski is civilized while they are savages.  Having been subdued Obroski is lain before Rungula.  By this time Tarzan is in a tree, apparently planted there for his convenience.  He looks down on Obroski in amazement to see a replica of himself.  p. 104:

In the light of a new day Tarzan of the Apes stood looking down upon the man who resembled him so closely that the ape-man experienced the uncanny sensation of standing apart, like a disembodied spirit, viewing his corporeal self.

What Burroughs is describing here is the splitting of the personality.  He may have the correct psychologically sequence, first the stripping of the armor- i.e. emasculation, and then the disembodiment, the dissociation of the mind and body.  The mind unable to deal with the reality seems to leave the body rising above and looking down on the humiliation of his poor self.  This theme runs all through Burroughs work although this is his most exact and detailed description.

Obroski has been led out to be tortured to death and eaten by Rungula the cannibal chief.  Usually Tarzan is placed in an arena to fight one or more wild beasts.  In a normal confrontation Obroski is a coward which is to say he is unable to defend himself.  In other words his subconscious mind has been conditioned to accept the dominance and authority of hte oppressor.  In still other words in a state of terror his subconscious had been accessed to accept certain hypnotic suggestions.  But, with his back to the wall his instinct of self-preservation overrules the hypnotic suggestion and he fights like the proverbial cornered rat.

In this instance he used his full potential to fell a whole battalion of Rungula’s men, performing authentic Tarzanic feats like lifting men above his head casting them among his foes.  At the time Tarzan is looking down at him he has finally been subdued lying at Rungula’s feet.

You know whre I’m going , don’t you?  Right.  that street corner in Chicago where John the Bully confronted young ERB.  Burroughs didn’t fight like a berserker though, he ran.  (Chief Run-gu-la?) But that was when he split his personality being able to look down on his corporeal self like a disembodied spirit.

As the Penguin Dictionary says:  Instances of hysterical or schizophrenic duplication of personality are well know to psychotherpy.  There are many examples of this phenomenon.  Here are a couple to show how it works.

When a person is enduring an unbearable situation in which he is powerless to resist, rather than believe the situation is happening to him he does split off a psychological projection of himself as a disembodied spirit who sympathetically views his now alter ego’s humiliation.

For instance when Jean Genet, the author and playwright was at the Mettray Reformatory he was caught out by a gang of homosexuals and gang raped.  As the rape progressed, escape being impossible while becoming so unbearable for him, to retain his sanity he split off a projection, a disembodied spirit, if you will, that floated above the scene.  Thus Genet was able to actually observe his rape without participating in it.  As he watched he muttered ‘Poor Jean, poor poor Jean.’  Thus the mind provides a somewhat feeble defense but one that allows one to keep one’s sanity after a fashion.  Of course the hypnotic suggestion  from this terrifically shameful event caused him to relinquish his will to the oppressor, part of the deal to keep one’s sanity.  Genet’s character was changed for life; he became a homosexual who had no will to resist that of men while becoming an active agent in his future degradation.  He was always able to rationalize his actions so that they seemed right.

I will use my own experience as a second example.  In kindergarten the elite group forced a confrontation with me in which they lost and looked bad.  Circumstances removed me to a different school before they had a chance to relaliate on me.   But then in second grade I was returned to that school.  At that point they were waiting for me.  This situation is more analogous to Burroughs than Genet but all three involve a rape of the mind which is what emasculation is.

The general conclusion is that my and Burroughs situations are normal, they happen to everyone.  Perhaps.  And everyone reacts in their individual way but everyone reacts.  A few years later and I would have been able to handle this situation without a problem as would have been true with Burroughs.  Remember with Burroughs however that while John the Bully only threatened him in 1884-85 fifteen years later in a similar to identical situation he had his head broken thus reinforcing the original situation.

In my case the situation formed my central childhood fixation as did Burroughs’.  My subconscious was opened to admit certain hypnotic suggestions which were fixed in my subconscious.  It then closed but refused to allow me to remember which of course is why the situation became a fixation, or suggestion I could not refuse to observe.

At recess in the second grade a group of, shall we say, twelve formed a semi-circle around me.  Like Burroughs I am compelled to make excuses for myself.  For the previous year I had been shuttled between foster homes and thus I had no support or defense.  I was alone.  In kindergarten the boy, the leaderof the pack, had ordered two new kids, the first Negroes in the school, to sit on the sandbox and not move during recess.  I took the Blacks’ side offering to fight the leader.  He, standing at point, declined combat stepping back into the support of his crowd gathered behind him.  That was his mistake.  He and his crowd had realized this.  Now in the second grade the boy still refused to challenge me individually.  Now they formed a semi-circle around me while their leader stood at keystone, still enveloped by his gang so that, I presume, they could fall on me if I resisted.

They all beamed hatred and contempt at me.  I was unable to resist the projected hatred of the boys and girls while at this date having only the vaguest or no notion of what I was guilty of, I was ordered to take a step forward which to my eternal shame I did.  In midstep I was ordered to stop and stay in that suspended step throughout recess.  To my shame, I did.  He said:  You’re going to have to be our nigger now.  The shame killed my personality, my identity, my ego.  I assumed the role of ‘nigger.’  Terror opened the way to the subconscious and the suggestion, you are a nigger, among others was entered.  Like Jean Genet a projection of myself arose above to say something like:  Poor kid, poor poor kid.’

The suggestion was so horrific to me that I immediately forgot it or, perhaps since that ego died the incident was not part of the life of the survivor.  The memory was accepted and encysted in my subconscious what Freud and Jung would call the unconscious.  I not only forgot the situation but I forgot the faces and names of the kids involved.  I could not remember them from that day forward although I could talk to them as though I did know them.

The consequence was that I had to do what I was told to do by nearly anyone.  Much the same as Burroughs who wrote a medieval story, of which he knew nothing, at the suggestion or command of Metcalf and wrote Son Of Tarzan which he later regretted, and Tarzan And The Ant Men at the suggestion or command of Bob Davis.  Buroughs became a variation of the dependent personality as did I.

On the one hand my conscious mind understood the proper means of defense but as I began to do so my subconscious mind overruled or shoved my conscious mind aside and obsequiously obeyed.

This plight was only changed when I succeeded in integrating my personality in the year of around forty-two.  That is to say the subconscious contents of my mind centered around the cyst of my central childhood fixation was made manifest to my conscious mind allowing the subconscious to be integrated into consciousness.  Where the ‘Id’ was ‘Ego’ shall be, as Freud put it.

Burroughs in  Lion Man at fifty-eight is describing the same situation as that experienced by Genet and myself but in a different way.  Like myself and Genet he would have been easy to direct.  So at that age he had not yet exorcised that particular demon.  As ERB kills Obroski off in this novel assuming both identities while discarding that of Obroski, returning the corpse to Hollywood, becoming solely Tarzan of the Apes one wonders if he succeeded in integraing his personality at that point.  That is what he is describing.

His experiences with John The Bully, the splitting of his personality explains why Tarzan observes from above rather than as a participant on the ground. In Lion Man perhaps agitated by the movie duplicate of the literary Tarzan he brought the situation of John the Bully to consciousness. Rungula the Bansuto taking John’s place while the aspect of Tarzan or his split off alter ego watches from above while Obroski fought like a berserker on the ground but was overcome by numbers or in the John situation, size.

Thus Tarzan spies on the safari from the trees by day while walking rhough the camp at night.  Having dealt with his humiliation in some way in Rungula’s village, when Orman and West are threatened by a lion Tarzan plummets from his tree to kill the lion on the ground then without a word vaults back into the tree.  Orman and West mistake him for his lookalike Obroski.  Thus we have the beginning of the reuniting of the split personality which will continue in the Heaven of the gorilla god.

Burroughs was under such extreme stress from both his sexual desires and the MGM betrayal that he must have felt half mad.  While he and Rhonda are captive in Heaven he says:  Sometimes I think I must be dreaming.  A statement that seems to be out of character for the Big Bwana.  The scene might be interpreted as ERB’s Anima and Animus being imprisoned while on one level God might represent MGM.

Tarzan comes into contact with Stanley Obroski which Tarzan finds amusing and lets them do.  Both women pinch tmeselves to see if they are dreaming or mad as well they might.  Tarzan rejects Naomi which must have confused her as she and Obroski were in love with each other.  Having ditched Naomi Tarzan/Obroski goes back for the wise cracking Rhonda.

Then too Burroughs actually describes Tarzan as a madman at one point.  This would be tantamount to describing himself as mad.  Indeed the whole novel centers on mad or insane happenings.

The madness or insanity would be an aspect of Tarzan’s viewing from above as a disembodied spirit.  The splitting off of the aspect from his and ERB’s personality would be the result of the extreme stress of the moment that produced the feeling of dizzying  madness.

Burroughs handling of the stress in what I consider a very extraordinary novel is abolutely masterly.  I can’t think of a finer science fiction story that the story within the story of God’s in his Heaven and all’s wrong with the world.

ADDENDUM

David Adams who had an advance copy of this piece brought up the point that perhaps Tom Orman in his drunken state was a comment on Emma’s drinking problem.  A scenario instantly suggested itself.

Imagine Orman in his drunken state as a personification of John Barleycorn.  Imagine sweet sober Naomi as Emma in her sober state and Obroski as Burroughs in his non-Tarzan, actually Obroski state.

John Barleycorn claimed Emma as his own as Orman claimed Naomi.  Barleycorn is a jealous man and won’t tolerate Burroughs as a lover of Emma.  So the couple have to sneak a moment or two when John Barleycorn isn’t around.  In other words, when Emma is sober.

As Burroughs fictionally represents the situation Obroski/Burroughs is visiting Naomi/Emma in her tent.  they appear to be in love and accord.  Orman is drunk in his tent and isn’t expected to be abroad.  Then Obroski hears the drunken Orman approaching the tent.  Unable to stand up to Orman Obroski obsequiously flees.

So in real life Burroughs and Emma are getting along fine until Emma hits the bottle conjuring up John Barleycorn.  ERB can’t compete with the bottle while Emma becomes verbally abusive under the influence just as Orman used the lash on bearers while drunk.  ERB can’t take it so like the bearers he vanishes into the night.

I think it may be a viable scenario although obviously ERB’s version of the truth.

End of Part II.  Part III, The Source follows.