Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure

by Richard A. Lupoff

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Space Exploration

Synopsis

So, just how was Tarzan created? Eager to know the inside story about the legendary John Carter and the amazing cities and peoples of Barsoom? Perhaps your taste is more suited to David Innes and the fantastic lost world at the Earth's core? Or maybe wrong-way Napier and the bizarre civilizations of cloud-enshrouded Venus are more to your liking? These pages contain all that you will ever want to know about the wondrous worlds and unforgettable characters penned by the master storyteller Edgar Rice Burroughs. Richard A. Lupoff, the respected critic and writer who helped spark a Burroughs revival in the 1960s, reveals fascinating details about the stories written by the creator of Tarzan. Featured here are outlines of all of Burroughs's major novels, with descriptions of how they were each written and their respective sources of inspiration.

Release date: August 27, 2015

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

“I am sorry that I have not led a more exciting existence, so that I might offer a more interesting biographical sketch; but I am one of those fellows who has few adventures and always gets to the fire after it is out.

“I was born in Peking at the time that my father was military advisor to the Empress of China and lived there, in the Forbidden City, until I was ten years old. An intimate knowledge of the Chinese language acquired during these years has often stood me in good stead since, especially in prosecuting two of my favorite studies, Chinese philosophy and Chinese ceramics.”

With these eyebrow-raising words, the son of a Chicago distiller once began a short, and purportedly autobiographical, manuscript which he appropriately entitled: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fiction Writer.

The elder Mr. Burroughs did his distilling not in the liquor industry but in the manufacture of batteries, and it is reasonable to assume that his imperial military contacts with Peking were somewhat less than few. His son, the “fiction writer” responsible for that delicious cock-and-bull story (which has never been published), was a man who enjoyed life to the fullest, and who loved to regale his friends and readers with the fruits of a sense of humor paralleling that of Irvin S. Cobb or even Mark Twain.

I never met Edgar Rice Burroughs, and yet I feel that I have known him all my life. Perhaps—although I doubt it—it could have something to do with the fact that our family lines brushed together in Sudbury, Massachusetts three centuries ago, when his ancestors and mine both settled down in the same village as early American colonists. But even if we had both lived together in some fancied previous incarnation, it would only have been as in-laws. Nevertheless, in Burroughs I feel a kindred spirit.

The world may think me in a strange position, as a churchman, to be writing these words of intimate appreciation about someone who did not have any great enthusiasm himself for organized religion. But ERB respected those who tried to live sincerely according to their beliefs, while reserving his contempt for lives ruled by sham and hypocrisy. And, although my own gospel is squarely centered in the Church of Jesus Christ, I make no apologies for having allowed myself to be influenced from afar by the contagious charm of the master story-teller. And actually, when it comes right down to the core of the matter, the barbed shafts which he occasionally hurled in his books at the followers of established religion are virtually identical with the indictments that I and my fellow pastors must sometimes preach to our own congregations; the necessity, for instance, of having a faith that is more than mere outward form.

I learned to read in kindergarten days by sitting on my father’s lap and watching the “bugs” on the page from which he would be reading to me the comics. This was just about the time when the Tarzan comics first appeared (1929), so perhaps it would not be stretching the truth too far to say that Tarzan may have helped teach me to read. In any case, I know that I had progressed on my own to the regular Tarzan books before I was very far advanced in the elementary grades. And then there came the unforgettable day when I discovered the first three Mars novels in an upstairs bookcase at my Aunt Martha’s. Another whole new world of reading pleasure thus opened up, but the same author was responsible. I can truthfully say that there are only two sets of books which I read in my childhood and which I still read and enjoy today, over thirty years later. There are the Holy Bible and the Lutheran Service Book on the one hand, and the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs on the other.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I read nothing else now, but it is simply that all other boyhood favorites have long since been tossed out, both physically and mentally. Those proliferous series—The Bobbsey Twins, Bomba the Jungle Boy, Tom Swift, Jerry Todd and Poppy Ott—they and many others all had their day, but the attempt to read them again as an adult is painful; the mature mind rejects them.

Not so with Burroughs. Twenty-five or thirty years ago I was reading his books for the sheer enjoyment of thrilling adventure in exotic locales. Now at the age of forty I am reading them for the enjoyment of Edgar Rice Burroughs as a humorist and satirist of no mean distinction, sometimes marveling at the subtle points that escaped my notice as a boy—but, in all truth, I’m still enjoying them as fascinating adventures, too! And I have also recently found myself with my emotions so captured as to reach the last page of such novels as The Son of Tarzan and Apache Devil with actually a glistening eye. That, to my mind, takes writing.

(Perhaps you’ll say it also takes a sentimental fool for a reader, but I give full credit to the literary power of an underrated author.)

ERB knew the difference between right and wrong, and he spun his yarns so that there was never any doubt in his reader’s mind either. His heroes and villains, together with the characteristics of each, were painted in unmistakable terms of black and white. And he was always scrupulous to keep his stories clean, even though they might also include violent battles and the spilling of countless buckets of blood. This is why it seems downright foolishness to me, to hear of anyone alleging that Burroughs’ works are unfit for children. Actually, taken in toto, they depict most clearly the relative merits of Good and Evil, along with an exaltation of the simple virtues such as honesty, kindness, and family devotion—with the opposing vices often played up in order to intensify the contrast. (The distortion of the movies has given many the false impression that Tarzan and Jane were not married, but ERB wrote them into wedlock in 1913—at the end of The Return of Tarzan—long before the first jungle picture was ever filmed.)

Burroughs was a family man himself before he ever started to write. His children were climbing over his lap while he was turning out his earlier tales of Tarzan, John Carter and the rest. He was writing for an adult audience, but at the same time he could not help but have the children very much in mind. And so he created characters that were larger than life, yet still completely believable. His Tarzan and John Carter, for instance, were mature men, even supermen. Without being dull, they exemplified noble and chivalrous ideals to a lofty degree. But they were also completely human, and the reader of any age has no trouble in identifying himself with them.

Burroughs later wrote that he hoped his readers would not take his stories too seriously. This unusual admonition was occasioned by the fact that many people were refusing to believe that they were reading fiction. He had such an uncanny skill at creating an aura of reality on the printed page, and drawing the reader right into the thick of even the most implausible situations, that it has always called for somewhat of a conscious mental effort not to take him seriously. The whole matter reached the point in the presidential election year of 1932, when depression-weary Americans were groping for a new leader, that one of the country’s popular magazines devoted its entire editorial page to a halfway serious review of the new phenomenon, under the banner headline, “Tarzan for President”!*

Let me conclude these already-overlong personal reflections by stating that I can have naught but respect and gratitude for Edgar Rice Burroughs. He wrote for the escapist enjoyment of countless thousands of adult readers like himself, but he also helped to mold my mind as a boy so that I grew with an appreciation of the finer traits of manhood and true nobility, as set forth in the little-short-of-real people whom he created. Life is not, as Burroughs oversimplified it, an existence in which one can always clearly distinguish between right and wrong. But when fundamental decisions must be made, the teachings of God’s Word would certainly not be vitiated should one also happen to have a background in the works of ERB. (There may be challenges to this statement, reflecting specific instances in a few places, but I am referring to the over-all impact of his writings as a whole.)

In what was undoubtedly one of the first articles about Burroughs ever published, Norma Bright Carson, editor of the John Wanamaker Books News Monthly, wrote in August 1918:

To every man his calling. There are those to whom God has given the power to instruct and lead their fellow men, and there are others endowed with a no less important ability—the ability to entertain—and to give to the world clean, strong, virile stories—stories that grip the boy and the boy’s father, and his mother and his sisters and his aunts, and such as the ability that God has given so bounteously to Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The writer did not dwell continuously on this high level; she also sketched a few of Burroughs’ other characteristics in the same article:

… But his hands! The Lord never intended those hands to wield anything lighter than a sledge, or play upon a more delicate instrument than an anvil—that the four-pound aluminum typewriter he uses in his work can withstand them is always a source of wonder to me.

Next to Mr. Burroughs’ devotion to his family comes his love of motoring. Rain or shine, summer or winter, you may see him every afternoon with his family upon the Chicago boulevards or far out on some delightful country road beyond the city’s limits. He loves the country, too, and the great outdoors, and every sport and game that needs the open for its playing. Yet in few such sports does he excel. In football and horsemanship he climbed close to the top, yet his tennis is about the funniest thing I ever saw, and his golf is absolutely pathetic …

The latter comment is echoed by some of Burroughs’ own gibes in his published works. In The Man-Eater (1915)*, a rich and indolent young man muses on how to spend the day:

“Golf’s an awful bore. Let’s not play today.”

“Tiresome game, tennis.”

“Ha! I have it! Great morning for a ride!”

Then there is also Carson Napier’s unforgettable definition in Lost on Venus (1932), when Duare heard him mention golf and asked what it was. “Golf,” he replied, “is a mental disorder.”

Such heartfelt emotion in 1932 was probably to some extent also due to the fact that Burroughs had just recently acquired (by foreclosure) the ownership of a championship golf course adjacent to his own property. He had sold this land to the country club prior to the Depression, and now, fully developed, it was back on his hands again.

Moving from Chicago to Los Angeles at the end of the first World War, the Burroughs family had purchased the extensive San Fernando Valley property of General Harrison Gray Otis, who had founded the Los Angeles Times and served as its editor until his death in 1917. Located in outlying Reseda, the estate was given the name “Tarzana Ranch” by its new owner. Within ten years, however, he had started selling off parts of it (at a profit) for the country club, and for new residential developments as Los Angeles continued its northwestward growth through the Valley. But the name had caught the public fancy, and in 1930 the expanding community was accorded the dignity of a separate post office of its own—Tarzana, California. The population of Tarzana is 16,000 today, but it was only 300 in 1930. Its “chief industry” then, and still recognized as such by the local press in 1962, is the small but prosperous firm of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. at 18354 Ventura Boulevard.

Edgar Rice Burroughs and Upton Sinclair, both Californians, seem to have been the two major American novelists who published their own books. In Burroughs’ case, this step did not materialize until 1931, twenty years after he started writing, and thus there are no “Burroughs” editions of the earlier Tarzan books. This is ironic in a way, for ERB’s fame had speedily been established by the best-selling of all his books, Tarzan of the Apes, which first appeared between hard covers a half century ago in June 1914.

The last new Tarzan story, Tarzan and the Madman, was published fifty years later (almost to the day) in June, 1964, although this forgotten manuscript had been written by Burroughs back in 1940. It is of interest to note that both the first and the last of the Tarzan books have something in common with a very unlikely third party: Portugal.

Tarzan and the Madman, a story with a “lost city” background, features a decadent Portuguese fiefdom in the heart of Africa. Tarzan of the Apes, on the other hand, seems to have no Portuguese aspect at all—until one looks at a map. Exactly where, dear reader, was Tarzan born? While never mentioned by name, the location of the little cabin on the shore of the landlocked harbor on the west coast of Africa is given in Jane Porter’s letter in chapter xviii of Tarzan of the Apes as “About 10 Degrees South Latitude.” Now there is only one place in the Southern Hemisphere where the Tenth and adjacent parallels intersect the west coast of Africa. Tarzan was born in Portuguese Angola.

It is understandable that we always think of him as domiciled in British territory, but this was not the case at the very beginning when the elder Lord and Lady Greystoke were marooned at that isolated spot on the west coast. After he came into his title, wealth, and a family of his own, Tarzan built and settled down on a ranch across the continent somewhere in British East Africa (either Kenya or Uganda). This became his base of operations for almost all succeeding forays into the jungle, from The Eternal Lover (1913) onward.

It might be of interest to interject at this point a comment on Tarzan’s British title. “John Clayton, Lord Greystoke” was not his real name. Many readers have overlooked the fact that on page 1 of the first Tarzan story, Burroughs wrote that “in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters.” And on page 2 of the same book, Tarzan of the Apes, he introduces Tarzan’s father as a “certain young English nobleman, whom we shall call John Clayton, Lord Greystoke …”

The author stated that his reason for using fictitious names in the story of Tarzan was to evidence “the sincerity of my own belief that it may be true.” This statement at the start of the book was part of the literary framing device, certainly. But I had the pleasure of discovering amid ERB’s papers in the office safe at Tarzana (and first reporting in an obscure footnote on page 191 of my Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs), that before he settled on the fictitious title of “Lord Greystoke.” Mr. Burroughs had originally outlined the first Tarzan story with its hero as heir to the title of … Lord Bloomstoke.

Burroughs’ writing career spanned both the First and the Second World Wars. Indeed, Tarzan was a veteran of both conflicts, although he did not serve with the uniformed regulars. But ERB wrote him into entanglements with German troops in Tarzan the Untamed (1918), and with the Japanese in Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion” (1944). Needless to say, the foe did not fare too well under these arrangements.

The author’s own semimilitary background—the Michigan academy days; trailing the Apache in the Southwest; in the home guard as an Illinois militia captain during World War I; a Pacific correspondent in World War II—gave his stories of fighting men, espionage, and the cavalry a certain degree of authenticity. And yet there are examples in his writings which can be quoted to prove that he was basically a man of peace.

One of the most stirring and impassioned pleas for human brotherhood that I have ever read came from the pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs. (It could also be thought of as evincing an anti-communist message, although the communist movement of today was hardly off the ground when this was written in 1911.) The passage occurs in chapter ten of A Princess of Mars, where John Carter hears for the first time the voice of his future wife. Dejah Thoris, as a solitary prisoner of the green men, bravely beseeches her captors in the audience chamber:

“Why, oh why will you not learn to live in amity with your fellows? Must you ever go on down the ages to your final extinction but little above the plane of the dumb brutes that serve you? You are a people without written language, without art, without homes, without love; the victims of eons of the horrible community idea. Owning everything in common, even to your women and children, has resulted in your owning nothing in common. You hate each other as you hate all else except yourselves. Come back to the ways of our common ancestors, come back to the light of kindliness and fellowship. The way is open to you; you will find the hands of the red men stretched out to aid you. Together we may do still more to regenerate our dying planet. The granddaughter of the greatest and mightiest of the red jeddaks has asked you. Will you come?”

Lorquas Ptomel and the warriors sat looking silently and intently at the young woman for several moments after she had ceased speaking. What was passing in their minds no man may know, but that they were moved I truly believe, and if one man high among them had been strong enough to rise above custom, that moment would have marked a new and mighty era for Mars.

Together with its old-fashioned eloquence, this passage from his very first story also serves to illustrate the very credible, if ponderous, eye-witness style in which Burroughs penned the earlier Martian tales, by couching them in the first person singular as the personal memoirs of John Carter.

In marked contrast to that “granddaughter” sequence written in 1911, and bridging all the Mars books in between, is the pleasantly flippant, easygoing style which Burroughs (and two worlds) had reached a generation or two later. Here are some lines written by ERB in 1940, with John Carter (again in the first person) telling of an unexpected meeting with his granddaughter, in Book One of Llana of Gathol:

“Llana!” I cried; “what are you doing here?”

“I might ask you the same question, my revered progenitor,” she shot back, with that lack of respect for my great age which has always characterized those closest to me in bonds of blood and affection.

Pan Dan Chee came forward rather open-mouthed and goggle-eyed. “Llana of Gathol!” he whispered as one might voice the name of a goddess. The roomful of anachronisms looked on more or less apathetically.

“Who is this person?” demanded Llana of Gathol.

“My friend, Pan Dan Chee of Horz,” I explained.

Pan Dan Chee unbuckled his sword and laid it at her feet …

“Well,” interrupted Kam Han Tor, “this is all very interesting and touching; but can’t we postpone it until we have gone down to the quays?”

This great difference in style is very characteristic of Burroughs, who remained young at heart all his days. His work at any given period reflects the popular idiom of that period quite well. This is equally true whether it be his early writings prior to World War I, or in the 1920s when he turned out probably his greatest works, or his valued contributions to the entertainment of the Depression-minded thirties, or his war stories of the forties. It almost seems that the older he got, the more light-heartedly he wrote. Perhaps, after all, it was a conscious effort on his part to avoid being taken seriously.

Many of his later writings—in between jungle perils and scientific swordplay, that is—were cast in the unpretentious mold of good-natured philosophizing. There was something of Will Rogers in him, too. Consider the contribution he once submitted when asked to participate in a collection of “Famous Recipes by Famous People”:

My tastes are uninteresting. I like ham and eggs, corned beef hash, fried chicken, plain hamburger on white toast. How they are properly prepared is more or less of a mystery that I have no desire to solve. Culinarily speaking, I am a washout.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

One of the big “ifs” in reviewing ERB’s career is the haunting question: would he have attained a more respectable niche in literary circles during the latter half of his long writing period, if he had not chosen to be his own publisher? Both through the advertising medium and through the providing of social contacts, an earnest publisher can often determine to a large extent any given author’s “image” before the public. But by publishing his own books in California from 1931 onward, Burroughs (who was never one to blow his own horn too loudly) inevitably withdrew to a considerable degree from the rest of the literary world, which was centered more in the East.

He himself acknowledged something of this situation in a typical letter to Cyril Clemens in 1940:

I am very sorry that I have no personal recollections of Zane Grey, inasmuch as I never met him.

Sorry I didn’t get around more.

Yours, Burroughs.

For these and other reasons, Edgar Rice Burroughs is very little known to the general public even to this day, a decade and a half after his death. The first full-length, hardcover book exclusively about Burroughs did not appear until 1964, and that was merely a glorified bibliography of his works. The present extraordinary opus by Richard Lupoff marks the first serious book ever published to examine in depth the literary contribution which Edgar Rice Burroughs has made to the world. As pleased as I was to have been responsible for the above-mentioned 1964 volume, I feel even more gratified to have been invited to have a part in this one.

In the course of his excellent work in this book, Mr. Lupoff deals at some length with the possible sources which may have inspired the creation of the various Burroughs characters and situations. If I may be permitted to do so, there is one other such possibility that I would venture to put forward, although it bears on only one aspect of a single book: Thuvia, Maid of Mars.

Thuvia was illustrated, as were so many other of the Burroughs first editions, by J. Allen St. John. This eminent Chicago artist was himself the author of one book published in 1905 (before ERB had ever started to write). St. John’s 156-page tour de force, entitled The Face in the Pool; A Faerie Tale, consisted of theme and variations on the standard fairy-tale motif of the bewitched princess in need of rescue.

When Burroughs wrote Thuvia in 1914, he created the phantom Bowmen of Lothar, those amazing illusions which could be materialized out of thin air and withdrawn again the same way by mental concentration of the Lotharians, and yet who (while visible) were great fighters who could inflict actual injuries and death on real men. It is thus of more than passing interest to note that J. Allen St. John wrote, in his “faerie tale” which was published in 1905 in Burroughs’ home town of Chicago, the following passage:

The Prince, seeing himself likely to be overpowered by sheer force of numbers, seized the tiny bag the Wise Man had given him, and, tearing the red cord from it with his left hand and teeth, scattered the black peas broadcast; then, setting his lance in rest, he charged swift as an eagles swoop, shield and body lying low to saddle, and the mighty battle-axe of Kelmet swinging from its steel chain at his wrist.

… Yet even so, the issue hung in the balance, as instantly a foe went down before the fury of his arm, another sprang to fill the gap, while from the castle men completely armed, shouting hoarse battle cries, rushed to join the fray.

But the tide was turned suddenly in his favor by the blackpeas he had scattered from the small green sack. These had no sooner touched the ground than in their place appeared the twenty men in sable armor, mounted in their steeds. Uttering no sound, silently they swung into the press, dealing such fearful blows with sword or mace and seconding Hardel so skillfully that in a little, the pass growing easier, the Prince, with a last charge and swing of his gleaming axe, beat down the few that still opposed, to thunder over the bridge and gain the forest road just beyond, followed by his twenty black-mailed henchmen. Nor did they draw rein till, the wood left far behind, they halted in a quiet valley some leagues away.

Hardel here turned, and facing them as they drew up in military order, each sitting motionless in his proper place, spoke words of praise and heartfelt thanks, to which they listened mutely. As he ceased speaking, one of the company drawing the little green bag from his gauntlet cast it before him on the turf, at which the knight at the extreme left rode up till he stood over the spot whereon it lay, and saluting the Prince with drawn sword, instantly vanished. The next in line did the like, and so on, till only the one who had thrown down the bag remained; then he, dismounting, picked it up, and handing it to Hardel, disappeared immediately it was in the Prince’s grasp, leaving him amazed, to peer into the sack and find the twenty small black peas lying innocently in it, as before.

Although the foregoing is a mere variant in the dragon’s teeth legend from Greek mythology, it has one significant difference. While the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus produced hostile warriors who fell upon each other, the black peas in St. John’s version produced friendly troops who fought on the Prince’s side against his enemies, and whose services could evidently be utilized again and again in the same manner as often as desired.

This was exactly the way Burroughs depicted the phantom bowmen in Thuvia, Maid of Mars, the only major difference being the method of their materialization. J. Allen St. John stood very high in Burroughs’ esteem as a man and as an illustrator. Was he also one of ERB’s sources?

Before we leave the subject of illustrations, something should be said about the great advantage that Burroughs enjoyed in writing his particular type of story. There is nothing which can “date” a book so quickly, and remove it from popular interest, as illustrations or a dust jacket (particularly the latter) depicting outmoded fashions of dress. But the Burroughs jackets successfully and probably unintentionally, skirted this pitfall. Inside the early Tarzan editions there were a few small St. John sketches showing long skirts and high collars, but even here these were far outnumbered by jungle scenes where relative freedom from clothing was the rule. There was no such problem at all in the Mars, Pellucidar and Venus books, which illustrated characters with different forms of dress entirely. Perhaps only in a single one of the Burroughs books was there a prominent picture which is “dated” in terms of American civilization: the frontispiece and jacket of The Girl from Hollywood (published in 1923); and even here the “Hollywood” aspect gives it some leeway. The more one thinks about this, the more concrete becomes the realization that a major factor in the continuing popularity of the Burroughs novels across decades of changing fashions was this matter of illustrations. There were plenty of them, but the unique “fashions” they depicted never went out of style.

ERB drew occasionally from real life, and in at least one instance he brought a contemporary world figure into the plot of a story. This was his use (presumably unauthorized) of one J. Stalin in the first chapter of Tarzan Triumphant (1931), in which Burroughs actually depicted him by name—“Stalin, the dictator of Red Russia”—in his Moscow office, and quoted him in the process of sending an OGPU emissary to Africa to liquidate Tarzan. What befell the OGPU man and his expedition constitutes one of the main plotlines of the book. The United States had not yet recognized the Soviet Union when this was written, but the Russian people had been reported in the mid-1920s as going mad over Tarzan, and it is rather strange to see Burroughs putting Stalin in the position of trying to kill him off. Did ERB intend this as a satire against Soviet copyright violators by implying that, in bilking him of his proper royalties, the Russians were killing the goose that laid the golden eggs? Or, in the light of Mr. Lupoff’s perceptive comments in this volume, was the Stalin plot against Tarzan simply another manifestation of a thinly-veiled wish on the part of the tired author? At any rate, the title of the book tells the inevitable outcom. . .