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I

The Series of Edgar Rice :

Lost Races and in American Popular Culture

James R. Nesteby

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree in

Doctor of Philosophy

August 1978

Approved: © 1978

JAMES RONALD NESTEBY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

¡ ¡ in

Abstract

The Tarzan series of (1875-1950), beginning

with the All-Story serialization in 1912 of Tarzan of the (1914

book), reveals deepseated racism in the popular imagination of early

twentieth-century American culture. The fictional of

races like that ruled by of (or ) are interwoven with

the realities of racism, particularly toward Afro-Americans and black

Africans. In analyzing popular culture, Stith Thompson's Motif-Index

of Folk-Literature (1932) and John G. Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (1976) are utilized for their indexing and formula

concepts. The groundwork for examining explanations of American culture which occur in Burroughs' science fantasies about Tarzan is provided by R. Browne, publisher of The Journal of Popular

Culture and The Journal of American Culture, and by Gene Wise, author of American Historical Explanations (1973).

The lost race tradition and its relationship to racism in

American popular fiction is explored through the inner earth motif popularized by John Cleves Symmes' Symzonla: A Voyage of Discovery

(1820) and Edgar Allan Poe's The narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838);

Burroughs frequently uses the motif in his perennially popular romances of adventure which have made (

Greystoke) an ubiquitous feature of American culture. The Tarzan IV

myth in silent like Tarzan of the Apes (1918) and Romance of

Tarzan (1918) is compared the the books about the Dark Continent of

Africa which Burroughs wrote. The parallels between Thomas Dixon's

The Clansman (1905) and D.W. Griffith's (1915)

are applied to the and book versions of Tarzan of the Apes.

Similarities between the Ku Klux Kian and the Tarzan Clans of America

are presented. With reverence for a lost and hostility

toward the unorthodox, particularly Afro-Americans and their culture,

the Kian represents an active form of the Anglo-Americanism found more passively in the Tarzan series.

Acknowledging that it should be judged foremostly for its entertainment value, the very unconsciousness with which the Tarzan series records popular American attitudes toward racism is important in analyzing American popular culture. Burroughs is a blatant racist who is also capable of satirizing through lost races and cultures his own and American ideas about the development and disintegration of races and cultures. Tarzan represents a rejection of twentieth-century American culture, for the values he upholds are from the nineteenth century. V

For

Fred and Milton Keichinger, Earl Higley, David Blair, and Juan Seda

They would have enjoyed reading it VI

Tarzan recalled something that he had read in the library at Paris of a lost race of white men that native legend described as living in the heart of .^ He wondered if he were not looking upon the ruins of the civilization that this strange people had wrought amid the savage surroundings of their strange and savage home.) Could it be possible that even now a remnant of that lost race inhabited the ruined grandeur that had once been their progenitor's?

From Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Return of Tarzan (1913) VI1

Acknowledgments

There has been a supportive cast behind this production which, in

the spirit of American Popular Culture Studies, has been worked on

from one edge of the country to the other—from San Diego,

California, to Bowling Green, Ohio, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

My initial interest in popular film, Tarzan, Africa, and

Progressives, has its origins in the courses given by three teachers at San Diego State University in 1974-1975: Paul Vanderwood, my master's adviser, Gene Wise, Distinguished Visiting Professor, and

Charles Cutter, inspired user of Tarzan in the classroom.

My teachers from the Popular Culture Department at Bowling Green

State University will recognize their contribution in the pages of this dissertation. My deepest thanks to Ray Browne, Jack Nachbar,

Tom Wymer, Mike Marsden, and Joe Arpad. Supportive people from the

English Department include Les Barber, Charles Crow, Tom Klein, and

Ken Robb. Bob and Bill Schurk, the former as a fellow student of

American popular culture, and the latter as the Director of the

Popular Culture Library and Audio Center at Bowling Green State

University, bring a much appreciated excitement and energy to our fields of common endeavor. Tom Clareson, A1 vac Carl son, and Kalika

Banerji have contributed in ways of which they are probably unaware.

Hazel Logan assisted with a generous grant at a most critical time in my doctoral studies, and Joan McClurkin provided the means to help finish the first draft. A persevering family has the vili

satisfaction of having contributed from beginning to end. The

English Department at Bowling Green State University awarded a

non-teaching doctoral fellowship which accelerated my progress toward

graduation, and the Popular Culture Department at Bowling Green State

University provided the motivation to progress toward graduation.

Special thanks are due my colleagues Alfred Jones, Director of

the National American Studies Faculty, and Roberta Gladowski,

Executive Director of the American Studies Association, for their encouragements and considerations in my quest to finish this project in addition to carrying out my duties as Assistant Director of the

National American Studies Faculty.

Lynn Adams Dierdorf and Mary Ann Grandjean are the two friendly editors of the kind all dissertation writers might hope for.

Semaj Betysen did the expert typing; she and Lord Greystoke deserve the final acknowledgment.

James R. Nesteby

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

August 1978 , 1X

Table of Contents

Page

Chapter One: Fame, Fortune, and Fun: The Motivations for Edgar Rice Burroughs to Write, and Write, and Write Tarzan Romances 1

Chapter Two: The Tarzan Motifs and Formulas: Indexing as a Method for Cultural Analysis 52

Chapter Three: Edgar Rice Burroughs: Science Fantasist and Writer 99

Chapter Four: The "White Myth" and Tarzan 139

Chapter Five: Tarzan and the Ku Klux Kian: Anglo-Americanism in the Twenties 171

Chapter Six: America, the Dark Continent 196

Endnotes 201

Works Consulted 222 Chapter One

Fame, Fortune, and Fun: The Motivations for Edgar Rice

Burroughs to Write, and Write, and Write Tarzan Romances

Romance, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the the writer's thought is tethered to probability, as a domestic horse to the hitching-post, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination--free, lawless, immune to bit and rein. Your novelist is a poor creature, as Carlyle might say-- a mere reporter. He may invent his characters and plot, but he must not imagine anything taking place that might not occur, albeit his entire narrative is candidly a lie.

African, n. A nigger that votes our way. Negro, n. The p-zèce de resistance in the American political problem. Representing him by the letter n, the Republicans begin to build their equation thus: "Let n = the white man." This, however, appears to give an unsatisfactory solution.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Tarzan of the Apes, Lord Greystoke, is a seminal literary

creation whose importance as a bearer of cultural facades for

American customs, beliefs, and mores is matchless. He is one of the preeminent figures in twentieth-century American popular culture.

Drawing upon a tradition of similar heroes present in all ages of lore, Tarzan's creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), has bequeathed to the world a powerful modern reincarnation of ,

Odysseus, Beowulf, Caliban, the Byronic Don Juan, Captain Ahab, and 2

Huckleberry Finn.

Most of the work on Tarzan and Edgar Rice Burroughs has been

done by a prolific coterie of Burroughs' admirers. There have been

numerous articles by fans to fans in fanzines, but, to date, there

have been only five significant book-length studies on Burroughs and

Burroughs' fiction. Presented chronologically below, they indicate a

progressive pattern of development. Henry Hardy Heins does

bibliographic work; Richard A. Lupoff considers the works as a

literary critic; Robert W. Fenton mounts a pastiche of parallels

between Burroughs and his fictional personality, Tarzan of the Apes;

Orth reworks Fenton's theme, among others, far more skillfully in his exploration of Burroughs as a writer; Porges authors a suberb and long-awaited official biography.

The earliest major work on Burroughs and his writings is Henry

Hardy Heins',<4 Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs

(1962; revised in 1964). Heins provides the groundwork on which the other books on Burroughs and his writings have been based.A treasure trove of information, it includes significant reviews of

Burroughs' literature, some Burroughs family history, and a reprinting of several of Burroughs' own articles on Tarzan. The latter part of the book emphasizes illustrations and advertisements as secondary art forms which flourished in conjunction with

Burroughs' writings. Dozens of illustrations and magazine covers are reproduced covering the work of Frank E. Schoonover, J. Allen St.

John, and the Burroughs brothers, Studley 0. and John Coleman. Still 3

of value, Heins' bibliography is updated periodically in ERB-dom, one of many Burroughs fan magazines, beginning with number 11 (Summer

1964).

The favorite of many Burroughs fans, Richard A. Lupoff's Edgar

Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965), literally takes up where

Heins left off because Heins wrote Lupoff's, Preface. Lupoff does in prose what Heins did in bibliography concerning the body of

Burroughs' works. Lupoff's thesis is that Burroughs is important because of his literary contribution. Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure is far and away the most critically developed and comprehensive guide to Burroughs' works.

Tarzan is presented as a fictionalized version of Burroughs in

Robert W. Fenton's quote-heavy The Big Swingers(1967). Fenton concocts some tantalizing parallels, but not enough for a book-length manuscript. By overstretching his shaky premises he arrives at absurd conclusions. Far more effective in this realm is Philip Jose

Farmer's fictional use of Tarzan to which there will be frequent allusions in this dissertation. In several of his always intriguing volumes, Farmer posits Burroughs as Lord Greystoke's biographer and himself as the continuer of that biography of the still living Lord

Grandrith or Lord Greystoke. Frequently disappointing in its lack of new insights and over use of familiar materials, Fenton's book is simply underwritten and not worthy of having this paragraph to itself.

Michael Paul Orth's literary biography of Burroughs, an 4

exceptionally incisive manuscript, is deserving of publication.

Currently available only as a dissertation titled "Tarzan's Revenge:

A Literary Biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs" (1973), its publication has perhaps been delayed by the advance publicity and subsequent publication in 1975 of Porge's official biography. Building on

Lupoff, and conquering totally the Fenton approach, Orth deals primarily with Burroughs as a writer. Burroughs, apparently, created a successful persona because he himself was unable to achieve success. Orth also attempts to go further than any of the others, including Porges, in relating Burroughs and Tarzan to cultural concerns; his findings in this regard have contributed many stepping stones and short cuts for the present investigation of Tarzan as a cultural phenomenon.

The most recent book on Burroughs and his creations is Irwin

Porges' official biography, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created

Tarzan (1975), published on the hundredth anniversary of Burroughs' birth. Masterfully researched and written--only the irksome and inefficient indexing system is disappointing--this work contains an abundance of details as as profuse illustrations, photographs, and drawings which serve to broaden the basis for an appreciation of ■Z' Burroughs' special genius. '

With the exceptions of the contemporaries Irwin Porges and

Michael Paul Orth, academic scholars have generally neglected

Burroughs and his creations in their publications. This is perhaps for the best, for the occasional indulgers are the eccentrics Leslie 5

Fiedler, Marshall McLuhan and, from an earlier generation, Rudolph

Altrocchi. Since the material has not yet been tamed by sophisticated academic writers, the major American cultural themes found in the Tarzan series are still manifest, still alive and raw.

Far more, given the orientation of these major works, is comprehended about Burroughs' life than about Tarzan's. Although this dissertation is therefore mainly about Tarzan of the Apes, a synopsis of Burroughs' career, and the milieu which fostered it, may nonetheless be an appropriate prelude to exploring some of the revelations which his most famous heroic creation can make in relation to culture in America.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was in his mid-thirties before he launched his writing career. Prior to this he held numerous jobs ranging from instructor at the Michigan Military Academy, to enlistee in the

Seventh Cavalry, to railroad cop in Salt Lake City, to clerk for

Sears, Roebuck and Company, to working for the American Battery

Company owned by his father. To overcome the mundanity of his occupations he allowed his mind to become preoccupied with heroic missions which he finally recorded on paper for sale to other dreamers. A great boost for Burroughs' career came about because the beginning of the era of best sellers coincided with the publication of Tarzan of the Apes in book form in 1914.

The most original of his fantasies is Tarzan of the Apes, a summary of which will suggest the attractive themes it embodies:

Lord John Clayton, in the employ of the British Colonial Office, and 6

Lady Alice Clayton are on their way to Africa in 1888 when

of the Fuwalda mutiny. Set off on the wild coast of Africa, near

present-day Angola, they build a cabin and Alice bears Tarzan. John

and Alice die within a year and the ape adopts the infant.

Eventually outstripping the apes who name him Tarzan, meaning "White

Skin," he overcomes an initial inferiority complex by making the

ropes and nooses with which he carries out his trickster instincts.

In exploring the cabin his parents built, he finds other famous

symbols of civilization: the knife and the books. Tarzan teaches

himself to read the bugs on the pages of the books. His aristocratic

blood (as well as his inheritance of civilization's knife and his

instinctual proclivity for clothing), contribute to his superior

development and he eventually becomes of the apes-.

Coincidentally, another ship, the Arrow, is mutinied and Jane

Porter is stranded near where John and Alice Clayton were set ashore.

Accompanying Jane are her absent-minded father, Professor Archimedes

Q. Porter, his private secretary, Samuel T. Philander, Jane's

Negress, Esmeralda, and Jane's fiance and false heir to the title of

Lord Greystoke, . Their leisurely routine is

disrupted by piracy, a treasure hunt, kidnappings, cannibals, and

for Jane, an arboreal affair.

Tarzan's initial adventures eventually take him out of the

, across deserts, onto the European Continent and, finally,

through the forests of Wisconsin. There, in the heartland of

America, Tarzan learns from his French friend, Paul D'Arnot, that the 7

results of a fingerprint test show that he, Tarzan, the son of Kala

of the Tribe of , is indeed the real Lord Greystoke. Rather

than declare his true identity to win Jane from her betrothed,

William Cecil Clayton, he abandons hope for his ideal union. The

last page of the book is most effectively left unwritten to

accomodate the first of over two dozen .

Marked themes of inherited superiority, survival of the fittest,

and Anglo civilization over African primitivism are worked into an

excitingly paced adventure. As an established writer with so eminent

a creation as Tarzan of the Apes, "Burroughs could insist that he was

in a business like any other American, the business which James Hart

calls 'purveying predigested daydreams to people who cannot dream for ? themselves."1 Unlike Booth Tarkington's Penrod or Harold Bell

Wright's The Eyes of the World, both published in 1914 as well,

Tarzan of the Apes never made any of the yearly lists of top ten best

sellers, according to Suzanne Ellery Green's information in Books for

Pleasure: Popular Fiction, 1914-1945 (1974). According to Frank

Luther Mott's figures in Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the (1947), however, Tarzan of the Apes was one of

thirteen best sellers (over 900,000 copies) during the decade from

1910 to 1919; it is one of only three listed for 1914, the other two 4 being Penrod and The Eyes of the World. Regardless of its initial best seller status, it has been a consistent seller and is now

incontestably one of America's most popular "predigested daydreams" as well as provocateur for numerous other dreamers. 8

There are some problems in dealing with popular literature of

this . Much of the older material, for instance, is available

only as 's items. Even the relatively recent Literature of

Burroughsiana (1963) by John Harwood, a one-hundred page duplicated

bib!iography, sells for no less than fifty dollars when a copy of it

can be located. This is not the inexpensive format that most young

scholars can afford, and yet Harwood's is not the kind of

bibliography which libraries normally put in their reference sections.5

Working with popular literature like the Tarzan series, at the

other extreme, has the advantage that nearly all of the books which

Burroughs wrote are available in inexpensive paperback editions.

Editions of the Tarzan books put out by in the sixties are

still available, but most accessible of all are the official editions

which has been publishing consistently since the

sixties. Robert , in A Guide to Middle Earth (1971), justifies

the use of the Ballantine Books editions of J.R.R. Tolkien because

"they are by far the most widely distributed." This is a compelling

reason when the literature involved is popular literature. The

Ballantine editions are used in this dissertation since few people,

academics or lay people, have convenient access to any other.

There are twenty-four Tarzan books in print by Ballantine Books and they form the nucleus of the Tarzan canon for the purposes of

this dissertation. As a rule, all quotations from Tarzan books)will* be cited within the text while all other sources will be cited in the 9

endnotes. Unless otherwise clearly indicated, the Ballantine

editions are used for all citations from the Tarzan texts. These

texts are, in the numbered order used by Ballantine Books,

#1 Tarzan of the Apes (1912 serial/1914 book) #2 The Return of Tarzan (1913 serial/1915 book) #3 The Beasts of Tarzan (1914 serial/1916 book) #4 (1915 serial/1917 book) #5 Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916 serial/1918 book) #6 (1916-1917 serial/1919 book) #7 Tarzan the Untamed (1919-1920 serial/1920 book) #8 (1921 serial/1921 book) #9 Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1922-1923 serial/1923 book) #10 Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924 serial/1924 book) #11 Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (1927-1928 serial/1928 book) #12 Tarzan and the Lost Empire (1928-1929 serial/1929 book) #13 Tarzan at the Earth's Core (1929-1930 serial/1930 book) #14 Tarzan the Invincible (1930-1931 serial/1931 book) #15 (1931-1932 serial/1932 book) #16 Tarzan and the City of (1932 serial/1933 book) #17 Tarzan and the Lion Man (1933-1934 serial/1934 book) #18 Tarzan and the Leopard Men (1932-1933 serial/1935 book) #19 Tarzan’s Quest (1935-1936 serial/1936 book) #20 Tarzan and the Forbidden City (1938 serial/1938 book) #21 Tarzan the Magnificent (1936 and 1937-1938 serial/1939 book) #22 Tarzan and "The Foreign Legion" (no serial/1947 book) #23 (no serial/1964 book) #24 Tarzan and the Castaways (1940-1941 serial/1964 book)

There is a twenty-fifth official Tarzan book published in the

Ballantine series, Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966), but, since

it is written by , it is not included in the present discussion of the Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

A drawback to the use of the Ballantine editions, in contrast to either the original serial versions or original hardcover editions, is that when they became the official publishers of the Tarzan series, the Ballantine editors censored what they considered the most racist passages from the Tarzan books.? Since racism is an integral 10

issue in this treatment of the Tarzan series, these deletions may

skew the evidence. In such cases, resort will be made to the Ace

Books editions to cite material not available in the Ballantine Books

editions. It will also be clear, however, that the Ballantine

editors did not chop enough of such racial tirades to make less

worthwhile extended discussion of Burroughs' racial attitudes; they

removed the inflammatory extremes of Burroughs' vocabulary, but left

the substance of his state of mind, which is far more pertinent to

this study.

There are two other previously published Tarzan books which

Ballantine Books does not include in its Tarzan series. These are

the stories for juveniles, The Tarzan Twins (no serial/1927 book) and

its , Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins with Jad-Bal-Ja, the Golden

Lion (no serial/1936 book). Their most recent publication in the

1963 edition combines the stories under the title,

Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins. A published work on Tarzan which has not been reprinted is the Official Guide of the Tarzan Clans of

America (1939). Among the unpublished Tarzan materials written by

Burroughs is an undated "humorous playlet" titled "Tarzan's Good

Deed Today," and "Tarzan & Jane: A Jungleogue," written in 1933; there is also extant an unfinished 25,000 word Tarzan manuscript.

Burroughs did not confine the far-ranging Tarzan to book-length adventures. Four of the Ballantine edition books are actually compilations of short stories or, in one instance, a novelette: The

Jungle Tales of Tarzan includes twelve stories of Tarzan's youth; 11

Tarzan the Untamed is a novelization of seven short stories; two

short stories make up Tarzan the Magnificent', and Tarzan and the

Castaways combines two stories and the novelette titled "Tarzan and

the Castaways."

Imitations of Tarzan of the Apes were created by Burroughs

himself as well as by dozens of other writers. Nadara is the title

character in The Girl (1913 serial/1925 book), an early

Burroughs story which presents a slightly disguised female Tarzan.

Nadara is the result of a suggestion in October 1912 from Tarzan's

original publisher, Thomas Newell Metcalf, that, in a sequel to

Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs introduce "a young woman who also had 8 been marooned in the wilderness and had grown up to be a savage."

Burroughs also created the Princess Fou-Tan, featured in

(1931 serial/1932 book), in an attempt to win an audience for a

female Tarzan; the most renowned of the female imitators of Tarzan,

Sheena, was not, however, created by Burroughs.

"The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw," originally published in All-Story Magazine in 1937, is ahumorousstorywith a Tarzan-jike’

figure in which Burroughs plots a reversal of the theme of atavism.

Jimber-Jaw, or Big Jim, is a 50,000 year-old man in the wastes of Northern Siberia until the famous scientist, Dr. Stade, and the adventuresome inventor, Wild Pat Morgan, thaw him out. The story is fun to read and it provides Burroughs with a vehicle for satirizing everything from the free enterprise system to the impertinence of

American women who stay up nights to drink and smoke--activities 12

which Big Jim thinks dissipate their energies and make them unfit to

tend the children and the cave during the day.

The Lad and the Lion (1917 serial/1938 book), utilizes a young

Tarzan-like figure called Michael. The film version of The Lad and the Lion, the first film produced from a Burroughs script, was released a year before Tarzan of the Apes (1918) appeared on the silent screen. Two Burroughs stories capitalizing on Tarzan's image,

"Nu of the Neocene" (1914 serial) and "Sweetheart Primeval" (1915 serial), were published together in book form as The Eternal Lover

(1925; The Eternal Savage is an alternate title). Henry Hardy Heins, in A Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rioe Burroughs

(1962), includes The Eternal Lover as the third book in the Tarzan series because of the fictional coincidence that Victoria Custer and her brother Barney, of Beatrice, Nebraska, happen to be at the

African estate of Lord and Greystoke at the same time ’the tireless biographer of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, is visiting there.The Custers, privileged literary characters who have actually met Tarzan, appear again in "Barney Custer of Beatrice" which, along with the story "," was published as a book in 1926 with the title The Mad King.

Another mention of the Greystoke clan outside of the Tarzan series is the reference to an historical Greystoke who is as great a as his later namesake is a knifesman. This Greystoke is probably an ancester of Lord Greystoke, Tarzan of the Apes, since the book in which he appears, The Outlaw of Tom (1914 serial/1927 13

book),while first published after the appearance of Tarzan of the

Apes, was actually written a few months beforehand. From this same

era, Burroughs momentarily usurped Tarzan, King of Beasts, as he

penned "Ben, King of Beasts" (1915 serial), a novelette which is

incorporated into The Lost Continent (1963 book); ""

(1916 serial) is the story which provides the original title and

portions of The Lost Continent. Matching in adventurousness its

famous predecessor, The (1912) by Arthur Doyle, and

surpassing it in imagination, The Lost Continent features both lost

lands and lost races.

As an initial example of Burroughs' romances about lost lands

and lost races (hereafter shortened simply to romances of lost

races), a genre which he used increasingly in his sequels to Tarzan

of the Apes, The Lost Continent is a delightful Burroughsian tale

which differs from the lost race formula of the Tarzan series

primarily in that it is set in the future rather than in the long-ago

past. Originally published during the Great War, The Lost Continent

is set in the twenty-second century. Topical issues of isolationism and imperialism are uniquély resolved by making Jefferson Turck,

Commander of the aero-submarine Coldwater, a defender of the

Pan-American Federation. This united front of the Hemisphere

represents an isolated bastion of civilization, for nothing has been known of the world beyond the thirtieth meridian since the Great War,

World War One.

The Coldwater is accidentally carried beyond thirty to an island 14

of and wild animals called Grabritin rather than Africa. The which The Lost Continent presents concerning the outcome of the Great War is admirably summarized in this sample of the satiric prose which Burroughs at times inserts in his romances:

Beyond thirty! Romance, adventure, strange peoples, fearsome beats--all the excitement and scurry of the lives of the twentieth century that have been denied us in these dull days of peace and prosaic prosperity—all, all lay beyond thirty, the invisible barrier between the stupid, commercial present and the carefree, barbarous past. What boy has not sighed for the good old days of wars, revolutions, and riots; how I used to pore over the chronicles of those old days, those dear old days, when workmen went armed to their labors; when they fell upon one another with gun and bomb and dagger, and the streets ran red with blood! Ah, but those were when life was worth the living; when a man who went out by night knew not at which dark corner a "foootpad" [sic] might leap upon and slay him; when wild beasts roamed the forest and the jungles, and there were savage men, and countries yet unexplored.13

Jefferson Turck's soliloquy stands as a statement of a basic

Burroughsian principle: human beings must resort to the primitive as frequently as they resort to the civilized ways of humankind; as

Tarzan demonstrates repeatedly, the primitive must be part of human culture or there is an unsatisfied, unfulfilled yearning for it.

Turck is not long delayed in meeting the beautiful but barbaric

Victory, his romantic attachment and, incidentally, the future Queen of . Turck and Victory escape from the Abyssinians only to fall prey to descendents of the Chinese (the two great perils of the era—the yellow and the black—revealed in their embryonic stage!).

The Great War has destroyed the white of ; the

Americas, Africa, and Asia won the Great War by not participating in it, and Turck and Victory's adventures result in the re-establishment 15

of exchange between these three twenty-second century empires.

Turck, who begins this adventure as a career militarist, finds himself in an England populated by African elephants and antelopes as well as lions and (the latter, it is carefully pointed out, deriving from Asia). Dissemination of these wild animals in

Grabritin is the result of their having escaped from the London Zoo during the Great War. Such savage and primitive symbols as Burroughs uses to describe the Dark Continent of Africa he uses also for

Grabritin. The imagery is like that which T.S. Eliot wove into "The

Hollow Men" (1925). Eliot's poem has the epitaph, perhaps intended only as an epigraph, taken from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

(1899): "Mistah Kurtz--he dead." In invading the darkness at the heart of existence Conrad, the adopted son of Great Britain, taps

Africa for his analogy. Turck's invasion of the darkness of

Grabritin is the equivalent. After Conrad and Burroughs, it is

Eliot's darkness too:

This is the dead land This is cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star.14

Eliot's elitist version suffers by comparison with Burroughs' vernacular version in The Lost Continent'.

I had come to find a wondrous civilization, and instead I found a wild- monarch of the realm where English kings had ruled. A lion reigned, undisturbed, within a few miles of the seat of one of the greatest governments the world has ever known, his domain a howling wilderness, where yesterday fell the shadows of the largest city in the world, (p. 52) 16

The jungle-like environs covering the once-mighty English nation are

used to reflect an anti-war sentiment typical of many Americans in

the several years after the Great War began, but before the United

States deciared i ts be!1i gerency/

Equally significant, The Lost Continent embodies a satirically

anti-white sentiment filled with frustration and disappointment in

its description of

the sad' decadence of a once enlightened race. To these depths of ignorance, brutality, and superstitution had the vaunted civilization of twentieth century England been plunged, and by what? War! I [Jefferson Turck] felt the structure of our time-honored militaristic arguments crumbling about me. (p. 72)

Burroughs apparently could not resist the temptation which complete

juxtaposition of social position accorded, for the dispersion of the white civilizations results in black hordes replacing them on the continent of Europe. To spice the scenes with familiar, if discordant, images, there are a few whites present as slaves.

The black hordes are actually quite advanced for "they looked upon the whites as their inferiors," Turck states of himself and his white companions, "and treated us accordingly. They had a literature of their own, and many of the men, even the common soldiers, were omnivorous readers" (p. 115). In Burroughs* mind, and in the minds of many Americans, having a literature is equated with having a civilization; since most black Africans have only a rudimentary written literature, relying instead on a strong oral literary tradition, the implication is that black Africans are uncivilized.

Thus, Turck*s surprise that after they are captured at an outpost of 17

a large black nation they are treated well, "humanely," by the

blacks. Turck becomes the servant of Abu Belick, a black colonel in

the cavalry of the Abyssinians. Abu Belick claims, in a continuation

of the satirical turnabout being presented by Burroughs, that his

people constitute "the oldest civilized country in the world" (p.

117).

These black Christians are bent on bringing their religion to

the white heathen by conquering the world; the mockery of the

Christian medieval crusades apparently has not been passed down to the twenty-second century Christians. In this empire, reflecting the attitudes predominant in South Africa and America in actuality, though the participants' positions are reversed,

even the few white*freemen of Abyssinia were never accorded anything approximating a position of social equality with the blacks. They live in the poorer districts of the cities, in little white colonies, and a black who marries a white is socially ostracized, (p. 119)

As he did with Africa, Burroughs imposes caste on this .

The Abyssinians are the aristocrats, "a fine-looking race of black men--tall, muscular, with fine teeth, and regular features, which incline distinctly toward the Semitic mold"; the Abyssinians are the officers while "among the soldiery a lower type of negro predominates, with thicker lips and broader, flatter noses" (p. 110).

Despite the fact that even the soldiers are "brave and loyal" and

"can read and write," Burroughs' tone in these passages reads like a damnation of the active colonial system at the heart of his pre-World

War One world order: 18

On the whole, it is apparent that the black race has thrived better in the past two centuries under men of its own color than it had under the domination of whites during all of previous history, (p. 120)

The case is made quite comfortably for Burroughs' white readers who would, of course, be more concerned had Burroughs challenged the inaccurate concept, which is part of the racist mythology of America, that white domination was forever the situation prior to the twentieth century.

The conflict in The Lost Continent is primarily between the

Christian black men from Africa and the heathen yellow men from Asia.

The point appears to be that, even as masters and slaves, blacks and whites together must face the , which may be a reflection of a 1916 attitude that Afro-Americans and Anglo-Americans together may have to, indeed, unite in America to stave off Asia. Yet, a few pages further on, when white Victory is to be put in the harem of a black man, King Menelek XIV, 1916 America is backing Burroughs' pronouncement that this is "a fate worse than death staring her in the face" (p. 130).

The pulp tradition from which Tarzan of the Apes emerged provided popular entertainment which attained mass distribution long before film, , or best sellers developed as popular culture media. Dime were the predecessors of pulp magazines, which take their generic name from the quality of paper used in printing them. Frank A. Munsey established himself as the transitional figure between the dime novels and the pulps when he began his career in the 19

mass production of cheap magazines in the 1880s. By 1912, Thomas

Newell Metcalf of All-Story Magazine could pay Burroughs $700 for the serial rights to Tarzan of the Apes, thereby setting on stage one of the twentieth century's most engaging characters in the business of out cultural tensions.

By the time the epic motion picture Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, Burroughs was on his way to becoming the most popular author in America, going far beyond H.G. , A. Conan

Doyle and Jack London in sales of his stories to the pulps. The mythical stature of Burroughs' creations, particularly Tarzan, was immediately recognized and this identification has done much to assure them continued popularity. Porges notes that Burroughs

stressed that it is not the style or "the handling" that counts—it's the story itself, as with the Tarzan story: "It was an accident that I happened to get the story into rny head, but the fact remains that the 'story' is interesting regardless of its dress. The story was what 'got' the readers."15

In addition, Burroughs' generalizations and beliefs are perhaps more reliable cultural indicators than those found in so-called serious literature. Orth points out that

Burroughs and other mass market writers like him, express the protests and dissatisfactions felt by millions of readers who recognized the promises of their world at the same time that they sought to satisfy their real yearnings for dignity and freedom.16

Such tensions, made melodramatic in the pulps, contributed to the success which pulp writers had in communicating with mass audiences.

The loyalty of Burroughs fans, in particular, has always been great.

This is largely due, no doubt, to the fact that through Burroughs the 20

fears and hopes of many Americans have been articulated and printed

in an ordinary way.

For his part, Burroughs wrote the Tarzan romances for fame,

fortune, and fun. Unpopular writers, like all writers, engage in the

egotistically-satisfying^ individualistic urge to slash messages on

paper with the aim of becoming famous. But few unpopular writers

write for fortune and fewer still write for fun. One of the world's most popular authors, Burroughs could nonetheless beat his own drum

of fame, for Robert E. Spiller's Literary History of the United

States (1946) attributes to Burroughs himself the claim that his works have been translated into at least fifty-six languages

Writing at first under the pressure of finding a steady means to support himself, a wife, and by 1912, a family of three children,

Burroughs adapted easily to having an abundance of fortune with which to purchase numerous automobiles, a large ranch covering what is now

Tarzana, California, and a house in plush Bel Air. Currently owned by Brian Wilson of the singing Beach Boys, the Bel Air house is still IO renowned as the house which Tarzan built. After the success of

Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs quickly utilized his newfound purchasing power by obtaining a vehicle and moving his family from windy to sunny San Diego. Like Jack London and Mark Twain, two other popular writers associated with California, Burroughs was a speculator who sought to make the investment which would result in his being financially secure for life; he invested heavily in the manufacture of the Apache airplane engine, for instance, but he never 21

substantially increased his fortune through any other means than by peddling Tarzan.

Burroughs admired the qualities he created in Tarzan. He reveled in action over detail, in fantasy over reality. The development of one character only, Tarzan, is important ultimately in his Tarzan romances. The reader's objective, Burroughs assumed, is to escape with the hero rather than face the literal world.

Burroughs too enjoyed his creation and he personally escaped to the

African jungles with Tarzan, Orth contends.

Inspired by the currency of literature about darkest Africa, there is no lack of material on which such escapades could have been based. Early travel accounts of Africa are recorded in Richard

Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques

Discoveries of the English Nation (1598-1600), and in works like

Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799) and

Charles Williams' Narratives and Adventures of Travellers in Africa

(1859). Teddy Roosevelt's African Game Trails: An Account of the

African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist (1909) was among the most famous of dozens of such accounts issued after Sir Henry

Morton Stanley's Through the Dark Continent (1878) and In Darkest

Africa (1890) excited the modern interest in African travel.

Stanley's narratives emphasize engagements with wizards, pygmies, and cannibals, and they include frequent descriptions of lions, elephants, monkies, , and snakes.

The American narratives in this vein tend to reinforce the theme 22

which Teddy Roosevelt himself is associated with as the big Anglo charging up San Juan Hill with American colors flying. The theme was 19 already well implanted in literature, but Teddy's little war brought out blatant support not only in the Hearst newspaper pulps but in pulp romances like Benajmin Rush Davenport's Anglo-Saxons

Onward! (1898). Undoubtedly, one of the great imaginative draws of

Tarzan is the fantasy, formed long before the inglorious inception of the twentieth century which the kidnapping of Spanish islands heralded, of a white man as benevolent dictator of the black continent, or at least that part of the African continent below the

Sahara and above the white crotch of southern Africa.

The Age of Exploration expired as the last frontiers of nature were encroached upon in places like the African interior.

Twentieth-century naturalistic writers in America turned to explore the rift between man and nature which science and technology served to emphasize. Burroughs, however, offered an equally satisfactory literary alternative by creating in his hero a purveyer of raw, unscientificized nature. Burroughs penned nature on the big screen, not under the microscope or bottled away in laboratories for eager undergraduates to ponder in their spare moments. Tarzan as a mythical figure shows up in interesting situations which flirt with the era's dominant school of literary naturalism. In explaining the struggle of man against nature in naturalistic literature, Stow

Persons, in American Minds: A History of Ideas (1958), applies Tarzan anachronistically in his discussion of Frank Norris' Moran of the 23

Lady Letty (1898): "the seagoing heroine, a female Tarzan, was determined to select as her mate the man who could throw her in a 20 wrestling match." There is here the implication that Tarzan is an image so identified with strains of naturalistic thought in turn-of-the-century America that evocation of Tarzan's name will make clear to the readers of Person's intellectual history the significance of his point. How unlike this are those writers,

Marshall McLuhan and Leo Gurko among them, according to Orth, who in considering

Tarzan as an American hero seem equally unspecific in their acquaintance; the Tarzan they write of exists independently of any dramatic or fictional context. For most Americans Tarzan is not a character in fiction, but an idea, a concept, listed and defined in Webster's New International Dictionary along with other nouns.21

The index to Persons' work, however, takes the mention of Tarzan so for granted that his name, used as a qualifier rather than a noun, is not included as a referent in the index.

Tarzan, despite his flirtations with it, is not in the naturalistic mode. He is an adventurer whose worth is in his activism rather than his passive succumbing to civilization. While the naturalists most frequently portray individuals who are forced into railing against nature or against their surroundings in civilization, like Larsen in Jack London's The Sea Wolf (1904) and Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925),

Tarzan dictates to nature rather than nature dictating to him. He cannot control the weather, of course, but he can subvert livestock 24

like elephants and lions placed in his domain by nature. And he can

effectively subdue his own kind, rather than ultimately being subdued

by the Africans and the apes. He also repels, as a god in aid of

nature, the western Anglos, usually hunters or scientists, who attempt to intrude upon nature's stronghold.

As with the great literary naturalist, Jack London, there exists an issue concerning whether Burroughs should be treated as a literary agent whose primary worth is based only upon an examination of his literature as literature, or as a cultural agent whose primary worth is based not only upon a consideration of his literary works, but upon his literary works in relation to his life and in relation to the culture in which he lived and wrote. Some critics would simply state that there is no issue because Burroughs himself was not literate. That, however, is a besmirching of his character rather than a judgment on his works. Americans who read, no matter how well, can apply their literacy to Burroughs' works far more easily than they can, for instance, to Ezra Pound's.

The issue is reflected in two major modes of twentieth-century criticism which are in opposition concerning London and Burroughs.

In one of their recurrent engagements with the American culture critics, the New Critics argue that since there is little intrinsic value as literature in the writings of London and Burroughs, they and their works should be ignored. The New Critics, perhaps, can find in

London and Burroughs too few trophies in their safaris for irony.

Certainly, the theme of the alienated artist, which they claim has 25

produced a detachment of art from culture, is an unconvincing extreme. This aberration is an attractive invitation to apply modern tools for cultural study to an enlightened historicism.

This is the other side of the issue, represented by the American studies and popular culture studies approach,which assumes that the worth of an author and an author's works resides not only in the works themselves, but in the relationship of both the author and his works to the culture. The culture concept demands a methodology which is not based solely on the values and assumptions of literary critics, but on the values and assumptions of critics from all fields of study whose criticism contributes to the understanding of any aspect of culture in America. Theoretically, the New Critics and the

American culture critics involved in American studies and popular culture studies are at opposing methodological poles. In practice, of course, they at times provide complementary scholarship on a subject.

Representative expressions illustrating the scholarly exchange between these critical approaches are those of Cleanth Brooks, R.W.B.

Lewis, and Robert Penn in American Literature: The Makers and the Making (1973), and the reply to their arguments concerning why they excluded London from their anthology which Earle Labor published several years later in Modem Fiction Studies as a defense of London.

Brooks, Lewis, and Warren conclude their New Criticism assessment of

London, and off-handedly of Burroughs, with the statement that,

as for London, the ideas of his time as caught in his 26

fiction have long since lost meaning. He remains a splendid writer of books for boys, but the intellectual significance of The Call of the Wild or of Jerry of the Islands now seems, except for historians of literature, no greater than that of Edgar Rice Burroughs' books about Tarzan or the exploration of .22

That R.W.B. Lewis, the author of the American studies work, The

American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth

Century (1955), acquiesces in such a conclusion represents a curious

alliance. It is perhaps explained in part by recalling the

importance of various phases of myth and symbol studies to both the

New Critics and to American studies scholars during the era in which

Lewis wrote The American Adam. An academic union between Lewis and

two eminent New Critics seems not so strange either upon reflection

that Lewis' exploration of the American cultural myth of the American

Adam relies almost exclusively upon elitist literature. In practice,

it should be pointed out, the Brooks, Lewis, and Warren anthology

utilizes cultural considerations in its commentary, although the

avowed theory of literature which they bring to the anthology

indicates that they will pay scant attention to such evidence.

There have been numerous responses to the Brooks, Lewis, and

Warren commentary on why they excluded London; the present discussion

is perhaps the first to challenge their exclusion of Burroughs. The

London scholar Howard Lachtman, for instance, lampooned the statement quoted above by placing it as an epigraph at the beginning of his 23 "Review of Earle Labor's Jack London." Earle Labor himself, however, has presented the strongest response thus far to the 27

assertions of the triumvirate:

Professors Brooks, Lewis, and Warren cannot make room for a London selection in their prestigious new American literature anthology--although they do manage, curiously enough, to spend over four full columns explaining why the works of this "imperfect realist," this "homemade intellectual," this "romantic adventurer" (admittedly "a splendid writer of books for boys") are no more worthy of admittance than "Edgar Rice Burroughs' books about Tarzan or the exploration of Mars." Theirs is a telling omission--one that leads directly to the heart of the question.24

Labor's questioning of the reasons these New Critics ignore the work of popular authors like London should be applauded for it is indeed a crucial probe deserving of considerable attention.

The indignation which Labor exhibits over the coupling of Jack

London's name with the name of Edgar Rice Burroughs, however, is ironic in light of the arguments he uses against the New Critics.

There appears to be a double standard at work in his rhetoric. Labor chafes at the fact that the New Critics relegate London and Burroughs to the same minor league team. Rather than a disparagement of the comparison between London and Burroughs, there is much to be said for a positive connection between the two popular authors. In his dissertation, titled "Jack London's America" (1967), for example,

Starling Price devotes several pages to the development of a lineage of vitalistic popular literature, inspired by , he claims, which includes , Jack London, and Edgar Rice 25 Burroughs. Furthermore, just as London's literature is a bridge between the Realist and Naturalist movements in America, it is a bridge between these movements and the romances of adventure written 28

by popular authors like Burroughs.

It may also be dangerous to maintain, as Labor does in his

Modem Fiction Studies article, that London's importance cannot be ignored because he has still today some eighty entries in Books in

Print (1975). By that standard, in contrast, Burroughs is even more important than London, for Burroughs has nearly a hundred titles in print. Rather than pit one against the other, however, both London and Burroughs obviously should be read and studied by scholars. Both have produced significant cultural documents which endure regardless of their meager status in relation to the standards of the New

Critics.

It is the inconsistent and unpersuasive reasoning behind their blackballing of writers like London and Burroughs, as well as the fact of the exclusions themselves, which weakens Brooks, Lewis, and

Warren's otherwise notable anthology. An author's popularity, unfortunately, appears to be a negative trait to these New Critics.

The assumption made by Brooks, Lewis, and Warren that the ideas of a writer so popular as London can ever lose their meaning, "except for historians of literature," is a far-fetched pronouncement upon the mind and thought not only of London, but on American culture as it existed in the decade from just after the turn of the century to just before World War One when London, followed shortly by Burroughs, apparently did permeate the hearts and minds of more Americans than any other writer.

Brooks, Lewis, and Warren, however, do acknowledge London as a 29

reflector of culture: "He is; an autodidact who has seized on the

ideas of the age." Their arguments are thus being applied

contradictorily, for, on the one hand, if London does reflect the

ideas of his age, how is it that, on the other hand, his expressions

of these ideas have lost their meaning? Brooks, Lewis, and Warren

are here committing one manifestation of what Bruce Kuklick defines

as "presentism" in his essay on "Myth and Symbol in American 27 Studies." Presentism is the practice of choosing to highlight only

that which is important today and forgetting about what was important

to those who made (the subtitle of the anthology is The Makers and

the Making), read, and passed judgment on the works in the era in

which they were written, published, and consumed.

The importance of London and his works is demonstrated in part

because critics like Brooks, Lewis, and Warren find it imperative to

launch extensive justifications for excluding him from their anthology. London, like Burroughs, plainly must be reckoned with in

some manner, even if it is to denounce him. Ray B. Browne offers another point of view on this issue in "Popular Culture and the 'New

Humanities'":

The creators of popular culture are more likely than "elite" authors to present "actuality" because they are less able to recreate reality, to extract from it its essences, its metaphors, "deeper" meanings. Popular creators see life pretty much as it is, and though they distort and manipulate, they are not able fully to falsify.28

London and Burroughs held influential popular views on many issues important to the culture of their times which they embodied in their 30

literature. The many inconsistencies in their worldly thinking

further reflect the unsettled temper of those times.

Although born within a year of one another, London's writing career was plummeting just as Burroughs' was soaring in the years from 1912 to 1916. In an earlier version of the Kipling-Burroughs controversy over the origins of Tarzan, Stanley Waterloo accused

London of plagiarizing Before Adam (1906) from his Story of Ab: A

Tale of the Time of the (1897); both stories deal with man's initial gropings toward a human civilization, a theme, like that of the feral human, which is quite as old as literature itself.

Similarly, it was perhaps the inflated ego of Rudyard Kipling which prompted him to write in Something of Myself (1937), concerning an unmentioned author, that

if it be in your power, bear serenely with imitators. My Jungle Book begot Zoos of them. But the genius of all genii was one who wrote a series called Tarzan of the Apes. I read it, but regret I never saw it on the films, where it rages most successfully. He had "jazzed" the motif of the Jungle Books, and, I imagine had thoroughly enjoyed himself.29

Porges cites the rebuttal in which Burroughs refers to the Romulus and Remus story in relation to Kipling's and Mowgli's animal nurse:

That Mr. Kipling selected a she-wolf to mother a man-child might more reasonably subject him to charges of plagiarism than the fact that I chose a she-ape should condemn me on a similar count. It is all very silly, and perhaps noticing such charges is sillier yet, but no man enjoys being branded a thief.30

It was indeed silly of Kipling to be so presumptuous about his own genius. Two enlightening sources for modern feral human stories are 31

Philip Jose Farmer's essay on "The Feral Human in Mythology and

Fiction" in his collection titled Mother Was a Lovely Beast: A Feral

Man Anthology (1974), and Rudolph Altrocchi's work on the "Ancestors of Tarzan" in his Sleuthing in the Stacks (1944). Having thoroughly explicated the commonality of the feral human theme in literature,

Altrocchi begins his concluding paragraph with a grand overview of the motif:

And so it was by accidental renderings that the perennially abandoned child born out of the ground, the result of adultery or the scion of nobility, exposed in all sorts of wildernesses, rivers and seas, from Ceylon to the Congo, from mysterious islands to Rome, nurtured by all sorts of she-beasts, and exceptionally resourceful, managed to survive to our days as the ever re-exploitable hairy waif and hero of legend and exotic story. It survived not because of casual animal foster-mothers, but by virtue of its essential humanity.31

Given the long tradition behind Mowgli, Kipling's rash desire to have fostered Tarzan is absurd. , lions, goats, and all manner of other animal nurses abound in the legions of the homo ferus, making any claim to originality concerning this motif by a modern utter nonsense.

It is unlikely that Kipling ever made the connection which

Porges did in attributing to Burroughs the parody, titled "The Black

Man's Burden" (n.d.), of Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" (1899).

Burroughs wrote his parody long before he wrote Tarzan of the Apes and more than likely Kipling never saw it. Yet it represents an example of the questioning mind of Burroughs as opposed to the stance of the ideologue, Kipling. The first, sixth, and concluding stanzas of Kipling's poem, cited immediately below, are followed by 32

Burroughs' response:

Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed— Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden— Ye dare not stoop to less— Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden— Have done with childish days— The lightly proffered laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers>32

If this is civilization's offering, it is poor substitute for the primitive ways that are being usurped under the banner of the "White

Man's Burden." Or, so states the author, who Porges claims in

Burroughs, of "The Black Man's Burden" (n.d., but published simultaneously [ca. 1899] with the widely distributed "White Man's

Burden" in the Pocatello Tribune at at time when Burroughs was living in the Pocatello, , area). The second, fifth, and concluding stanzas of "The Black Man's Burden" are as follows:

Take up the white man's burden Your own was not enough; He'll burden you with taxes; But though the road be rough, 33

"To him who waits," remember, "All things in time shall come;" The white man's culture brings you The white man's God, and rum.

Take up the white man's burden, And learn by what you've lost That white men called as counsel Means black man pays the cost. Your right to fertile acres . Their priests will teach you well Have gained your fathers only A desert claim in hell.

Take up the white man's burden; Go learn to wear his clothes; You may look like the devil; But nobody cares who knows. Peruse the work of — Thank gods that you're alive— And learn the reason clearly: — The fittest alone survive.33

Burroughs was not, if this parody is any indication of his

temperament, a strict Darwinist in the way in which Darwinism was applied to race. He can be distinguished by his recognition of the values to be found in both primitive man and civilized man, by his questioning of the premises of racial supremacy, and in his ability to glorify for the sake of adventure such hybrid characters as

Tarzan. Such shifts in perspective make it difficult to evaluate

Burroughs' intent in presenting particular themes and motifs concerning race. There is no continuity to the point of view which

Burroughs might take up concerning race in any particular work and, indeed, it may be that Burroughs consciously acted as a satirist; certainly he demonstrates a sense of humor concerning such matters as when he published in a local newspaper the parody of Kipling's 34

earth-shaking manifesto.

There are other literary predecessors who may or may not have influenced Burroughs directly. Harry Prentice's Captured by Apes

(1892), for instance, features a man who lives with apes in Africa.

John Buchan's Prester John (1910) opens with an Afro-American

Christian preacher caught worshipping the devil and proceeds to a jewel- adventure in Africa. Kipling's works in general influenced Burroughs-Burroughs acknowledged that long before the quarrel between them arose—but so too did H. Rider Haggard and, perhaps, Edgar Wallace. Haggard's popularizing of the lost race motif in romances is looked at in the second chapter, but a few words about Wallace, who published Bo sambo of the River in 1914, are appropriate here. With the exception of his later contribution to the creation of in the early thirties, Wallace's most popular stories are those which emanated from Sanders of the River

(1909 or 1911). Also utilizing black Africa as a setting, Wallace wrote over one hundred Sanders stories during the same period that

Burroughs churned out his Tarzan tales.

For no other reason than to add to the controversy over

Burroughs' sources for Tarzan of the Apes, there is here mentioned a once-popular work by Thomas Love Peacock called Melincourt or Sir

Oran Haut-ton (1817). An orangutan, cousin to the apes who fostered

Tarzan, is brought to England and, with a little currying and prompting, is made into a Member of Parliament from the borough of

Onevote. It is Sir Telegraph Paxarett who voices Peacock's elaborate 35

refutations of Lord James Burnett Monboddo's popular ideas about the

origins of humankind:

God save King Oran! By the by, you put me very much in mind of Valentine and Orson. This of yours [Sir Oran Haut-ton] will turn out some day to be the son of a king, lost in the woods, and suckled by a lioness:—"No waiter, but a knight templar:"—no Oran, but a true prince.34

The wild man Sir Oran Haut-ton will turn out to be a "son of a king"

just as the wild man Tarzan turns out to be Lord Greystoke; and as

Sir Oran Haut-ton may have been "lost in the woods, and suckled by a

lioness," so was Tarzan lost in the forests of Africa and suckled by

an ape! For whatever they are worth, the thematic parallels between

Tarzan and Sir Oran Haut-ton are far more reasonable than those

between Tarzan and Mowgli.

Another clever burlesque, this one of post-Burroughsian jungle

literature, is Coconut Oil: June Triplett's Amazing Book Out of

Darkest Africa! (1931), as told to Corey Ford. Trader Horn has led

Triplett's party to a cannibal village where the first surprise is to find Minnie, Triplett's old Afro-American laundress, among the

African natives. Minnie explains that it is the Great Depression which brought her and others from Harlem to Africa, for "we foun' we 35 could pick up more money over here, posing fo' the explorers."

Trader Horn betrays Triplett to the cannibal king, and she is ushered off to a hut where the king's harem of twenty or so blonde women are lounging. Triplett is greeted by Nina and Tena who inform her that she is White Goddess Twenty-Sevena. Being a White Goddess is a

"tough racket today," Nina tells Triplett, who is not particularly 36

enthralled with its potential as an occupation anyway:

"White Goddesses aren't the big attraction in Africa that they used to be," Nina added. "They're a drug on the market these days. Too many of them killed the demand. There isn't a White Goddess nowadays in one book out of seven. Nobody ever comes to rescue us any more," she went on bitterly.36

Nina's problem, of course, is that she got stuck in Coconut Oil and

not in the Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs where her talents as

a White Goddess would still put her in good stead in the early

thirties. This burlesque of the formula for jungle tales rings true,

however, just as does Peacock's burlesque of the intelligentsia and

Parliament.

By the time the depression era began to wane, the major theme in

the pulps of the discovery of lost white races or lost white harems

in darkest Africa had peaked and was already on the decline. This

trend did not put an end to the numerous apings of Tarzan, needless

to say. Without the slightest claim to exhaustiveness, the following

list gives some examples of the power of Tarzan of the Apes to induce

non-Burroughsian sequels by a variety of copiers: Marco Garron's

Azan the Ape Man (n.d) and the series by Barton Werper (pseudonym for

Peter T. and Peggy 0. Scott), which includes Tarzan and the Cave City

(1964), Tarzan and the Silver Globe (1964), Tarzan and the Abominable

Snowman (1965), Tarzan and the Snake People (1965), and Tarzan and the Winged Invaders (1965). A successful copyright infringement suit by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Incorporated, put a halt to Werper's Tarzan series.

There were two magazines titled Jungle Stories which modelled 37

themselves on Burroughs' creations. The first was published only in

1931, but the second survived from 1938 to 1954. The later Jungle

Stories magazine featured Sheena, a seductive female Tarzan, as well 37 as the imitation male Tarzan, Ki-. wrote

Jan of the Jungle (1931), and, in The Jungle Goddess (n.d.), Orne

Sackville produced a female Tarzan stationed in Africa, this one raised by jackals (perhaps in deference to Kipling). J.T. Edson's

Bunduki (1975) is about a female Tarzan who has the distinction of being Tarzan's adopted granddaughter.

There are other authors like Werper who constructed entire series of Tarzan-like stories or, as with Kioga, stories of legitimate lineal descendents of Tarzan of the Apes: Maurice Gardner wrote a series of seven Bantan stories; the Bomba series, begun in

1926, was stretched into twenty or so books by Roy Rockwood

(pseudonym for Edward Stratemeyer); C.T. Stoneham capitalized on The

Lion's Way (1931) and its sequel, Kaspa, the Lion Man (1933); Robert

E. Howard started the Conan series which is still being furthered by such authors as L. Sprague de Camp; taking a vine from the Tarzan series, The World's Greatest Athlete (1973) lets slip the line, "Me

Nanu, you Jane," which is perhaps the most serialized piece of lore credited to Tarzan;^ and the four'Kioga books by William L. Chester originally serialized in the thirties, have recently been reprinted in book form by Daw Publishers'.

In March 1959, Thomas Llewellan Jones published "The Man Who 39 Really Was . . . Tarzan," a story premised on what Burroughs' 38

series revealed about Tarzan's life. Jones suggests that Burroughs based Tarzan on the fictional fifteen-year stay in Africa, after being shipwrecked and adopted by apes, of Lord William Charles

Mildin, Fourteenth Earl of Streatham. The most original addition to

Tarzan lore by Jones is that his Tarzan precursor married seven

African women. This is an understandable development given the audience for a story which was first published in Man’s World. There is also a novel twist that his numerous children by these seven wives might be the rightful heirs to the Earl's estate!

Even more imaginative in the line up of Tarzan simulations are the works by Philip Jose Farmer. His Tarzan, and his Tarzan-like heroes, are built squarely and without apology upon the works by

Burroughs, as the dedication to his Lord Tyger (1970) intimates:

"This story is dedicated to Edgar Rice Burroughs, without whom my childhood and youth would have been inestimably deprived and 40 colorless." Lord Tyger is the absorbing tale of a young man, Ras,

Lord Tyger, who is manipulated by interests into becoming the only indisputable member of Homo Tarzanusl

Beyond its numerous progeny, official and otherwise, another item for which Tarzan of the Apes is famous is a zoological slip which Burroughs made in the serialized version. It is doubtful that any other author has been made to pay so heavily for such an error as placing a on a fictional African continent! If verisimilitude is wanting in Burroughs' case, then perhaps near-Doctors of

Philosophy in English should make use of incidental information 39

acquired in required British literature courses to point out that

tigers in Africa can be attributed to less famous writers like the

sometimes revered boyish poet, Thomas Chatterton, and to the early

Anglo female writer, Aphra Behn, in what is usually perceived as her

anti-slavery tract--despite its reinforcement of a slavery concept

based on class and wealth instead of on race—Oroonoko: Or The Royal

Slave (1688). Nature zealots have not jumped on the venerable Daniel

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) for putting tigers in Africa, either,

and there is no end to the number of writers who slip in an

illegitimate alligator or two with the crocodiles of Africa.

Burroughs is in a grand Anglo; tradition of perpetual ignorance about

the Dark Continent.

Burroughs, not surprisingly, never went to Africa. He did not

need to since he rarely wrote about Africa. His knowledge of the

continent did not extend much beyond the general conceptions and

misconceptions which most Americans held about Africa. Thus,

Americans have always been susceptible to the emergence of such

reinforcers of their values as Tarzan of the Apes. Africa is a

setting which, as with the genre of the American western, has little

to do with the real Africa or the real American West. Michael

McCarthy documents several of the appeals which the two frontiers had

in common: the exoticism of the unknown, a place for Anglo

settlement and the conversion of primitives, mobility and an escape 41 route from civilization." Burroughs, in fact, also wrote westerns which embody the same themes found in his Tarzan series. Whether the 40

the setting is the American West or the African Continent, Burroughs' stories are primarily about adventurers.

For the sake of tradition within a genre, and for verisimilitude, the adventurers stake their claim to an emotionally charged area and proceed to engage themselves in incidents which have more to do with their authors' deftness in tap dancing on values and mores than on representing fact of any sort. A popular writer like

Burroughs does sometimes go further, for, as Philip Jose Farmer remarks, "it is true that the Tarzan stories are largely 'just adventure,' but Tarzan is also a Candide wearing a leopard loincloth and is armed not only with a knife but an objective view of 42 mankind." Burroughs, in certain moods, was as bitter a satirist as

Swift; he could also be as superficially playful and harmless with his criticism as was Mark Twain until the dilemmas posed by the creation of Nigger Jim and Huck Finn became apparent.

Tarzan and the Ant Men employs extensive social criticism, clothed in satiric barbs, on such issues as women's rights, taxes, and prohibition. In describing Jana, The Red Flower of Zoram,

Burroughs notes in Tarzan at the Earth's Core that "her people had few superstitions, not having advanced sufficiently in the direction of civilization to have developed a priesthood" (p. 79). These attitudes mask the dilemmas which Tarzan faces every time he is resurrected for a new adventure. He is like Huck Finn who is caught between the demands of civilized customs and the lust for primitive freedom. Huck Finn, according to Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in 41

the American Novel (I960), is a

marginal American type, who only wants to stay alive; but who does not find this very easy to do, being assailed on the one side by forces of violence, which begrudge him the little he asks, and on the other, by forces of benevolence, which insist that he ask for more/3

The same could be said of Tarzan, despite his pulp origins, for he too is in that strong American literary current which includes Saul

Bellow's Henderson. As Fiedler ties it together, "Saul Bellow, composing a homoerotic Tarzan of the Apes in Henderson the Rain King, 44 is back on the raft with Mark Twain." The most startling characteristics of Tarzan, Huck Finn and Henderson are those which they have in common with the literary tradition clarified by Hoxie

Neale Fairchild's The : A Study in Romantic Naturalism

(1928). They are each involved in the romantic impulse toward a return to nature. For Fairchild, romantic naturalism is to be more specifically

applied, not to philosophical materialism or to literary realism, but to that peculiar form of naturalism which arises from a desire to find the supernatural within the natural, or, in other words, to achieve an emotionally satisfying fusion of the real and the unreal, the obvious and the mysterious.45

In this context, "a Noble Savage is any free and wild being who draws directly from nature virtues which raise doubts as to the value of A C civilization." Fairchild includes Negroes, American Indians, South

Sea Islanders, and Caribbeans as Noble Savages. Tarzan, then, is a white Noble Savage, as are Huck Finn and Henderson to a lesser degree.

More particularly, however, it is Tarzan of the Apes, the model 42

for Homo Tarzanus, along with the series which Burroughs was inspired

to write about him, which forms the primary focus of this project.

There is considerable emphasis on the original work itself, published

first in 1912, in addition to its two dozen Burroughsian progeny.

The publication of Tarzan of the Apes represents a spot in time to

which to return as frequently as necessary in order to add clarity to

what went before and what came after it.

In each of the chapters the relationship of Tarzan to various

other cultural phenomena is taken up. Thus, the approach to the

Tarzan series is not literary but cultural. Burroughs' books about

Tarzan of the Apes are enlisted as primary documents through which to

look at two major cultural themes in America: lost races and racism.

The two themes are integral to one another since in Burroughs'

writing they both rely upon Darwin's theory of evolution, and

Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism with its catch-phrase of

"survival of the fittest," which provide a scale on which to judge

the level of humanity reached by various peoples, real or imagined.

These ideas led to the implication that a superior race had

evolved, in this case the pure lineage of the Anglo-Saxons. The

concept of a pure race is, of course, a myth: "The racial purist is

the victim of a mythology. For what is 'racial inheritance'?," asks

Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture (1934); her response is that

"heredity is an affair of family lines. Beyond that it is mythology.1,47 Benedict is far ahead of her time when she separates culture from inheritance, undoing the social engineering through 43

which the Social Darwinists brought them together in the late

nineteenth century:

What really binds men together is their culture,--the ideas and the standards they have in common. If instead of selecting a symbol like common blood heredity and making a slogan of it, the nation turned its attention rather to the culture that unites its people, emphasizing its major merits and recognizing the different values which may develop in a different culture, it would substitute realistic thinking for a kind of symbolism which is dangerous because it is misleading.48

The American nation did not immediately alter its direction, or its conceptions of Afro-American or African culture, though the social upheavals of the sixties now signal breakthroughs which Benedict advanced in the thirties. It is precisely the assumptions about heredity and culture which Burroughs incorporated in the Tarzan series that she attacked more generally in American culture.

In furthering the racial mythology, Burroughs stocked his Tarzan romances not only with numerous lost races ranging from La's people in Opar to the Trohanadalmakusians and Veltopismakusians in Minuni, but with the racist perspectives current in his lifetime concerning, primarily, Afro-Americans and black Africans. That the two themes fed off of one another is clear from the endless parallels which

Burroughs draws between them and the fact that often the formula

Burroughs employs allows for the substitution of one for the other.

This, undoubtedly, is due to the inordinate obsession with things racial which so permeated American consciousness in the era of Jim

Crow from 1896 to 1954, from the "separate but equal" Supreme Court decision of /’Jessyy. Ferguson to the "integrate equaljy" decision of

Brown v. The Topeka Board of Education. The subtleties of the Jim 44

Crow racial hierarchy existing in American was written up

intricately and grotesquely in popular fiction. One did not spawn

the other, but the fantasies of discovery and conquest of lost races,

and the realities of living with a race made lawfully subservient, must certainly have fostered one another.

The chore of the remainder of this dissertation is to make an

initial attempt to weave together these two major motifs found in the

Tarzan romances. The white supremacist theme is manifest in

Burroughs' rhetorical bigotry and racism as is its ideological cousin

the lost race or lost civilization theme. Both the racism of

American culture and the lost races of American fiction rely upon the concepts of superior and inferior forms of humanity and culture.

Since America is controlled by people of superior racial stock who have developed a superior culture, it is only natural, in this line of reasoning, that all less fortunate peoples should be conquered if they are inferior forms of humanity or converted if they possess

'inferior cultures;/ Such is the burden of* the American white „man in’, the Jim Crow era.

In terms of cultural importance, it is in this nebulous area of popular thought about race, and about the position of the white

American male in regard to race, that the two themes of lost races and racism merge. The intellectual debate concerning race is not nearly so pertinent as are the cultural manifestations of racial issues—in the sense both of lost races and racism—which popular authors like Burroughs recorded and many millions of Americans read 45

and did not, and still do not, find disturbing enough to stop

reading.

Burroughs utilized major American cultural themes in

constituting his formula stories. In his writing he was able to plug

in issues contemporary to these themes. The resultant works refract

ideas and emotions current in America during the first half of the

twentieth century. The predominant sentiments about American culture

found in the Tarzan series are conservative; they represent a

definite hankering for the nineteenth rather than the twentieth

century. To reinforce the thesis concerning the years 1912-1917

developed by Henry F. May in The End of American Innocence: A Study

of the First Years of Our Time (1959), the publication of Tarzan of

the Apes in 1912 might be said to mark the end of the nineteenth

century; it certainly cannot, on the other hand, be said to mark the

beginning of the twentieth century since the only forward-looking

aspects are those deriving from extrapolation of contemporary

scientific discoveries. The mores, values, and popular thought

implanted in the Tarzan series are those of a vanishing era. Their

popularity throughout the twentieth century is probably due in part

to the desire of readers to somehow hold onto attitudes that are no

longer valid in mainstream American culture. Outlets in the form of

escaping to fantastic lands peopled by lost races are simply a

counterpart to the reality of living in America where the thin crust of stability built upon domination of the Afro-American population

still maintains continuity with nineteenth-century values. 46

Aside from the popularity arising from its conservatism, it must

not be overlooked that, regardless of one's ideological agreements or

disagreements with the author, these works are highly entertaining.

They are, in fact, intended to be no more than that; Burroughs

certainly did not in any of the Tarzan stories attempt to write a

political tract or a philosophical treatise worthy of extended

contemplation. His work should be appreciated for its success in

being a relief from the humdrum lives which many people lead.

It is because the prejudice in his works is not calculatedly

implanted, other than in a formulaic sense, that makes the Tarzan series important. Burroughs did not, surely, go out of his way to be a racist. His era was a particularly racist one and his works by and large reflect dominant Anglo attitudes toward Afro-Americans and black Africans. He has been singled out for this exercise in scholarship simply because he is so popular, has such lasting appeal, and is so American in his outlook. For how many authors, to ask a rhetorical question which makes English professors flinch, can it be stated that few or none of their works have been forgotten by their readers? Practically everything which Burroughs wrote is still in print. Such widespread permeation of the American culture by one author in itself suggests that the material, regardless of why and under what conditions it was produced, is worthy of serious treatment.

Burroughs' work cannot be approached with the attitude of New

Critic purists who find it hard to acknowledge the importance of 47

anything other than literature written for literature's sake.

Burroughs wrote for people's sake, not for literature's. His purpose

is important, ultimately, because his influence is as formative of

American culture as the influence of all but a sprinkling of

literati. Burroughs is also important, ironically, because he is probably the most maligned (due perhaps to his exceptional popularity), American author, and the author most often separated out as the representative of what is deemed terrifically bad writing.

There are many reasons why this is a presumptuous point of view, but, for the moment, the most important rebuttal, in terms of the aims of this dissertation, is the only partially satiric observation that the

Great American Cash Register does not consistently praise a writer the culture considers worthless.

Perhaps more influential than literature on Burroughs are the non-literary sources to which he was exposed. Burroughs was maturing in the age when most frontiers seemed to be conquered, when the gigantic industrial and urban areas like his home town of Chicago came into being, and when natural scientists were amazing the world with their unearthing of paleontological discoveries. The Columbian

Exposition of 1893, a colossal exhibition of material culture, took place in Chicago when Burroughs was eighteen. Driving an electric demonstrator surrey for his father's battery company, Burroughs had plenty of exposure to the exposition:

the White City had been carefully planned to instruct a generation of Americans in the grandeur and romance of Beaux Arts school of architecture, and with millions of his 48

countrymen, Burroughs was suitably impressed. Whenever he needed a building or a city--particularly a ruined city--for a lost civilization in his fiction, he described a version of the McKim, White, and Gold confection/9

Ambrose Bierce's definition of the romance as "fiction that owes no

allegiance to the God of Things as They Are" could have been pointing

to the romance of fictional culture exhibited by the Columbian

Exposition as well as to the type of adventure story which Burroughs

would write about Tarzan.

But Bierce would have had more to remark about the Exposition

than just its wild demonstration of the American imagination. He

might have wrapped a smile around his devil's advocate tongue and

congratulated himself on the accuracy with which his cryptic

characterizations of an African as "a nigger that votes our way" and a Negro as "the p/èee de résistance of the American political

problem" were upheld by the temper of the Columbian Exposition.

In his recent article titled "The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893: Racist Underpinnings of a Utopian Artifact," Robert W.

Rydell makes several pertinent points about the flaws in the American cultural fabric which the exposition revealed:

The exposition may have been a utopian of the good life, but in reality the White City was closely related to the Midway Plaisance, the honky-tonk sector of the fair which operated under the auspices of the exposition's Department of Ethnology. Hailed by many as the greatest ethnological display in the history of the world, the Midway provided visitors with apparent ethnological, scientific sanction for the American image of the non-white world as barbaric and childlike. The Plaisance, in short, served as a convenient moral, cultural, and racial yardstick by which to compare and measure America's achievements with those of other peoples. Viewed in the light of American racial attitudes toward the Japanese, Chinese, 49

Blacks, and American Indians, the realities of the situation challenged the belief that the White City represented a future society in which all humanity lived together in love and brotherhood.50

This model for the lost cities which Burroughs later peopled with lost races was, moreover, another manifestation of the albatross in

American racial relations. There was even a "sliding scale of humanity" on the Midway Plaisance, in accordance with Social

Darwinist thought, that had the whitest peoples assigned to the spaces closest to White City and the darkest peoples placed at the 51 far end! Input by the Afro-American community in the creation of the Columbian Exposition was negligible, as befits the era, and the

Afro-American press and such Afro-American spokespersons as Frederick

Douglass and Ida Wells referred disparagingly to White City as a

"white " and a "white sepulcher."

It was by reflecting these elements of American culture in his fiction that Burroughs became the most collected and, in terms of total book sales, the most popular American author. Like the

Columbian Exposition of 1893, Burroughs garnered his popularity by providing romantic escapism based on a racial mythology in which

Tarzan, as a symbol for American culture, would reinforce conservative and racist nineteenth-century American values. With this general introduction to the subject in mind, the remainder of this dissertation is divided into the following chapters:

Chapter Two: "The Tarzan Motifs and Formulas: Indexing as a

Method for Cultural Analysis." The rationales for a popular 50

literature indexing project for the Tarzan series are considered

along with its significance in relation to folklore studies,

specifically to Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature

(1932). This chapter introduces the premises for John G. Cawelti's

formula studies in Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (1976) in relation

to other possible approaches to popular literature. The issue of

what scholars are looking for popular literature to reveal is also

taken up in relation to the lost race theme in the Tarzan series.

Chapter Three: "Edgar Rice Burroughs: Science Fantasist and

Science Fiction Writer." This chapter concentrates on the inner

earth idea in the lost land and lost race literary tradition—with

special emphasis on John Cleves Symmes' Symzonia: A Voyage of

Discovery (1820) and Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym

(1838)--before discussing Burroughs' series, particularly

Tarzan at the Earth's Core. Distinctions between and

science fiction are made by drawing upon the examples of

and World as well as Burroughs' works.

Chapter Four: "The 'White Ape Myth' and Tarzan." This chapter

extends the discussion of Tarzan books into a discussion of popular

films in the silent era. It draws heavily on the literature-to-film

relationship of Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (1905) to D.W. Griffith's

The Birth of a Nation (1915). The original Tarzan book and original

Tarzan film are put in the context of other jungle films of the

silent era to better discern prevalent racial attitudes in America.

Chapter Five: "Tarzan and the Ku Klux Kian: Anglo-Americanism 51

in the Twenties." By extending the discussion of Dixon and Griffith initiated in the previous chapter, some parallels between Tarzan and the Ku Klux Kian are developed. The basis for the appeal of both the

Ku Klux Kian and the Tarzan Clans of America are looked at in their trappings as well as in their ideologies.

Chapter Six: "America, the Dark Continent." This is the conclusion, short and succinct, in which the significance of this exercise in scholarship is extracted. ¿"2

Chapter Two

The Tarzan Motifs and Formulas:

Indexing as a Method for Cultural Analysis

La of Opar, the High Priestess of the Flaming God of the Temple of the Sun and Queen of the lost Atlantean city of Opar. Young, intelligent, and shapely, La's "bare arms and legs were," according to her creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs,

almost concealed by the massive, bejeweled ornaments which covered them, while her single leopard skin was supported by a close-fitting girdle of golden rings set in strange designs with innumerable small diamonds. In the girdle she carried a long, jeweled knife. {The Return of Tarzan, p. 168)

Her knife is the sacred sacrificial instrument which comes perilously close to penetrating the heart of Tarzan of the Apes on numerous occasions. But La is in love with Tarzan as well and is always inwardly happy when fate intervenes to save Tarzan from her knife and the bloodthirsty executioners of Opar.

Opar, the City of Gold, is a lost colony of Atlantis located in a forbidden valley in Africa. Its stone construction and sophisticated architecture and carvings denote that it was once occupied by a highly civilized race. The male inhabitants have degenerated because of sexual intermixing with apes, but the females have somehow remained purely human. Thus, La's attraction to Tarzan is quite explicable for Tarzan is at once more primitive than black Africans and more civilized than Anglos--even Africans do not prefer raw meat, rodents, grubs, and beetles, as does Tarzan; even Anglos lack the exceptional nobility of spirit and ability to quell and make allies of the wildest of beasts which Tarzan possesses. He is a god-like white man--Tarzan means "white skin"--whose tanned, sleek, brown body ranges over six feet high; he is a wild and savage woodland demigod whose extraordinarily beautiful face is complemented by black hair and grey eyes:

His straight and perfect figure, muscled as the best of the ancient Roman gladiators must have been muscled, and 53

yet with the soft and sinuous curves of a Greek god, told at a glance the wondrous combination of enormous strength with suppleness and speed.

A personification was Tarzan of the Apes, of the primitive man, the hunter, the warrior. {Tarzan of the Apes, p. 97)

He is also self-educated, a speaker of dozens of languages.

Leaving Jane behind, Tarzan goes to La's Opar in quest of gold and diamonds. There, Tarzan and La spend much of their time together fighting their antagonists^in the African jungle. While Tarzan is in love with Jane, La is in love with Tarzan. On one trip, Tarzan loses his memory, conveniently, and is captured by La who, when she cannot extract his promise of love and fealty, prepares to sacrifice him. Tarzan is bound by ropes. Her nerve to kill the one she loves fails, however, and she drops down to embrace him passionately:

She ran her hands in mute caress over his naked flesh; she covered his forehead, his eyes, his lips with hot kisses; she covered him with her body as though to protect him from the hideous fate she had ordained for him, and in trembling, piteous tones she begged him for his love. For hours the frenzy of her passion possessed the burning handmaiden of the Flaming God, until at last sleep overpowered her and she lapsed into unconsciousness beside the man she had sworn to torture and to slay. And Tarzan, untroubled by thoughts of the future, slept peacefully in La's embrace. {Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, p. 70)

Despite the naturalness of their primitive companionship, Tarzan remains true—to the best of his memory—to the civilized Jane. When in Opar he spends most of his time restoring La to her throne instead of pursuing one of literature's great unfulfilled love matches. (2/20; 2/22-25; 5/2; 5/4-15; 5/18; 5/23-24; 8/9; 9/14-16; 9/18; 9/20-21; 10/22; 14/1-9; 14/12; 14/14-17; 16/7)

The preceding information about La and Tarzan in Opar is a composite developed from seven of the twenty-four books by Edgar Rice

Burroughs currently in print. Beginning with the second Tarzan romance, The Return of Tarzan (1913 serial/1914 book), the quest for 54

the riches of La's Atlantean colony of Opar becomes a frequent formula in the Tarzan series.1 Additional books in which La and Opar are particularly important include Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar

(1916 serial/1918 book), Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1922-1923 serial/1923 book), and Tarzan the Invincible (1930-1931 serial/1931 book). These works were written across the span of a generation,

1915 to 1931, and include, in the numbering used for Ballantine

Books' paperback Tarzan series, those works cited at the end of the epigraph by book and chapter numbers (2/20 meaning book number two chapter number twenty, and so on). The information about La and Opar presented above could not have been drawn from a single Tarzan book, a significant point when dealing with serialized popular literature.

A series like that of Burroughs' Tarzan must be put into a larger context as well. In this case it is the Atlantean strain of the lost race tradition in popular literature. The full title of

Olaf W. Anderson's The Treasure Vault of Atlantis (1925) provides a capsulized view of the motifs emphasized by writers in the lost race tradition: The Treasure Vaults of Atlantis, Giving an Account of a

Very Remarkable Discovery of an Ancient Temple of Wealth Built and

Concealed within a Mountain of Rock Amidst Tropical Jungle by a

People of a Forgotten Civilization that Existed Before the Great

Flood; also a Record of the Mysterious Messages that Seemed to Come from a Supernatural Source that Led to the Very Wonderful Adventures and the Fascinating Story of a Great Love Related Herein. Africa is another tropical jungle locale for lost races, lost valleys, lost 55

lands, lost civilizations, and lost cities like Opar not only in

Burroughs' Tarzan series, Fritz Leiber's Tarzan and the Golden Valley (1966), and Philip Jos/ Farmer's Hadon of Ancient Opar (1974) and

Flight to Opar (1976), but also for a predecessor who inspired

Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, who wrote an array of influential

popular romances among which are King Solomon's Mines (1885), Allan o Quatermain (1887), and She: A History of Adventure (1887). Haggard

moved the lost race idea from the utopian novel to the popular novel,

or, more accurately, the romance. Douglas Menville and R. Reginald

overview the impact Haggard has had on popular literature in this manner:

The lost race novel was popularized by Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925), who virtually established the genre overnight with his novels of African adventure, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), neither of which has ever been out-of-print since initial publication. Haggard went on to write another 50 books, but is remembered today for those first two stories. Haggard established the conventions of the genre by setting both books in the unexplored regions of deepest Africa, where strange, unknown races, often the remnants of lost tribes or ancient civilizations, lay hidden away in deep canyons, - unknown valleys, underground chambers or beyond barriers of rock or ice. The lost race novel was immensely popular in the 1890s and early 1900s, but gradually faded away as the unexplored regions of the earth were filled in. Most of the later books in the genre were set in the polar regions. Today the genre has virtually disappeared, having moved on to other unexplored areas, especially outer space.4

Burroughs' Opar is a variation on the land of Ophir associated in legend with King Solomon. In King Solomon's Mines, Haggard suggests that the in Kukuanaland near the mines is Ophir of biblical 5 fame. The and myths associated with Africa on which the

Tarzan series relies are common in the cultures of the West, though 56

not necessarily so in the cultures of Africa. A scholarly combatting

of this fantastic use of lost lands and lost races in popular

literature is Basil Davidson's now standard treatment of The Lost

Cities of Africa (1959). Davidson, unfortunately, does not address

the popular literature directly; he prefers instead the equally

important approach of establishing the facts about the cultures of

Africa.

Haggard's romances, on the other hand, inspired many of the myths about African locales in Mabie Fuller Blodgett's At the Queen’s

Mercy (1897) and Sidney J. Marshall's The King of Kor; or She 's

Promise Kept. A Continuation of the Great Story of "She" by H. Rider Haggard (1903), one of scores of such imitation sequels to She.^

Only Burroughs, however, repeatedly reached a similar pinnacle of success in the genre of lost race romances. By integrating the lost race theme into a majority of his romances, Burroughs was instrumental in keeping the genre vibrant well into the twentieth century.

Precisely because Burroughs did return to this theme throughout his writing career, to know the full story of La and Tarzan in the lost city of Opar the reader must become familiar with nearly the entire series of twenty-four Tarzan books. Thus, if the reader of the Tarzan series comes in search of information on La and Opar only, it cannot be found easily and quickly. An index to the series would permit this access as well as provide a format and method for cultural analysis. 57

Though information about La and Opar is scattered throughout the

Tarzan series, there are also consistent characters like the villains

Rokoff and Paulvitch who show up first in The Return of Tarzan. They

serve the Tarzan serial by providing continuity through The Beasts of

Tarzan (1914 serial/1916 book), leading finally to Rokoff's unwitting

engagement at a dinner party with a hungry Sheeta, to The Son of

Tarzan (1915 serial/1917 book) wherein Paulvitch continues his

haunting of Tarzan for awhile longer. Techniques like this connect

the books in the series by providing the enticement of storyline

overlapping into storyline which keeps readers pressing on from

Ballatine Books' #1, Tarzan of the Apes (1912 serial/1914 book)

through #24, Tarzan and the Castaways (1940-1941 serial/1964 book).

The effect is cumulative, for each successive work draws upon the earlier adventures.

Each Tarzan book has its own integrity as a story, it should be cautioned, and, although an index will have the same content as the series on which it is based, using an index is certainly not the same experience as using the series. The essence of Tarzan's appeal is available only by sampling the books as Burroughs wrote them.

Nonetheless, it is the series, and not just one or a few of the books in the series, that is the important entity for the present discussion.

Once a thorough index for the Tarzan series is developed which includes major objects, flora and fauna, Burroughsianomers (Hista,

Tarmangani, Gomangani, Mugambi, M'ganwazam, Waruturi, and so on), 58

characters, and events, it is simple enough to pass over most of

those million or more words which Burroughs wrote about the

adventures of Tarzan and locate the relevant passages about a subject

like La and Opar. In its simplest form, the construction of such an

index involves a close reading of the texts and prolific notetaking.

Information from each book is collated and the final entries are

written on the basis of the information from all the works in the

series. Each entry is referenced as to book and chapter.

In the plan of the universe—at least in the universe frequented

by academicians—such an indexing project might seem at first to have

no known orbit. But just as charts, maps, catalogs, lists, and

indexes are used to help make the astronomical universe comprehensible, so is the tracking of patterns or pigeonholes of knowledge, a means of making comprehensible the more popular perceptions. Looking at popular literature requires aids similar to those used in any study. An index provides a means of isolating the techniques of suspense building, for instance, as well as the trappings of such rituals as the famous Tarzan victory yell and the significance of icons like the knife which Tarzan inherited from civilization. Isolating elements carries with it dangers which demand a scholarly commitment to two ends: that such surgery as indexing represents will ultimately result in a significant contribution to knowledge, and that, ultimately, the enjoyment and entertainment which readers of Tarzan books experience will be significantly enhanced by the index. 59

Studies of both folklore and formulas place a heavy emphasis on

isolating motifs. Following the lead of John G. Cawelti's studies,

elements of formula like ritual and repetitive plotting are examined

in this chapter. Burroughs' conventional limits and inventional

potential in Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924 serial/1924 book), in

particular, will be looked at. In these familiar and highly

communicable stories, which appeal more to the emotions than to the

intellect, there is material which helps unwrap the package called

culture when methods of analysis Hike indexing motifs and formulas

are utilized.

The significance of the Dum Dum used in the Tarzan series, for

example, extends far beyond an orgiastic ritual of a local band of

apes. It will be looked at in relation to the concept prevalent in

early twentieth-century America of the black African who becomes the devil because of his participation in savage dances which signify the most primitive stages of human development. Similarly, critical attention can be drawn to premised on racist attitudes like that which has Esmeralda--'s three-hundred-pound black nanny—going through her ordeals concocting such hybrid malapropisms as terrifical and gorilephants ! Esmeralda as a loyal but ignorant Afro-American is no different than the stereotypes in early film featuring coons like Stepin Fetchit and the numerous black votaries of Mae West who always said the right—and at the same time very wrong—thing, to win a laugh for Mae.

There are also connections between the motifs and formulas in 60

popular literature and those found in folklore. These ties are

important in constructing a view of the American cultural fabric.

Looking effectively across media or across genres is impossible if

the perspective being applied is limited to that of a folklorist or

if the attitudes expressed are limited to those of a devotee of

popular literature. Cultural studies are premised on the idea that

artifacts have significance beyond a single genre or discipline or

medium; or that, as a result of exposure to the attitudes,

methodologies, and values which other genres, disciplines, and media

bring to bear on the artifact, it takes on added significance.

Stith Thompson, in compiling his Motif-Index of Folk-Literature

(1932), made a start in this direction by suggesting that

there is much common matter in the folk-literature of the world. The similarities consist not so often in complete tales as in single motifs. . . .—those details out of which full-fledged narratives are composed. It is these simple elements which can form a common basis for a systematic arrangement of the whole body of traditional literature. Only after such cataloging will it be possible to make adequate use of the collections now existing in print and in manuscript.7

The difference here between a motif and a formula is the difference

between an element and a purposefully constructed set of elements.

Formulas, then, may be defined as often-repeated stories which take place in an imaginary world in which commonly-held values are threatened by stereotypical villains; through conventional patterns of heroic action these commonly-held values are upheld by archetypal heroes like Tarzan. In the index entries for the Tarzan series, the motifs, or "elements of narrative structure," can thus be worked into 61

larger units of formula.

A task of major proportions would be the matching up of the motifs which Stith Thompson and1 his progeny have established with those motifs which Edgar Rice Burroughs used to construct his formulas for the Tarzan series. Among many that it would be appropriate to cite in a brief listing from Thompson's Motif-Index of

Folk-Literature are "culture hero snatched from mother's side"

(A511.1) as Tarzan was snatched by Kala the ape from his crib near where his dead mother lay; "baboons abduct boy" (R13.2) which is near-relative to the apes abducting baby Tarzan; "strong hero suckled by animal" (F611.2.1) as baby Tarzan is suckled by his foster mother,

Kala the ape; "animal nurse (animal nourishes abandoned child)"

(B535) has over twenty multi-national examples of animals nourishing abandoned children in a fashion similar to that which Tarzan's foster mother, the great ape, Kala, did for him. The dispute over the source of the idea of a child like Tarzan raised by animals obviously extends beyond Rudyard Kipling's egoistic claim that Burroughs stole it from his Mowgli of the jungle, and even beyond the often cited

Romulus and Remus legend.

Among the transformations which Tarzan undergoes are

"transformation from man to ape" (D118.1), which he survives as a baby, and the "transformation from simian to person" (D318) or

"transformation from monkey to person" (D318.1), which he undergoes in both a physical and psychological sense as a young man. "Wild man lives alone in the woods like a beast" (F567) is the fate of Tarzan 62

the youth, and a life to which he returns repeatedly even after

having opportunities to join civilization. "Weak (small) hero

overcomes large fighter" (L311) is one of young Tarzan's numerous

rites of passage into manhood when he defeats such antagonists as the

great bull ape, Terkoz. "Strong man kills animals with own hands"

(F628.1) and "wild man of superhuman strength" (F610.1) are fortes of

Tarzan in dealing with every beast from ape to lion , to rhino,

although often he makes use of his knife as well as his full-Nelson.

"Animal language learned" (B217) is an essential motif for the

Tarzan stories for it enables him to be a member of the "kingdom of monkeys" (B221.1) and to participate in such rituals as when the

"animal parliament elects king" (B236). Tarzan as Lord of the Jungle

is reflected in the motifs of "wild man as king of animals" (B240.3) and "king of monkeys" (B241.2.2). The "wild man of noble birth"

(P55) is Tarzan, the English Lord Greystoke, who as a benevolent but authoritarian "culture hero established law and order" (A530).

There are other motifs which are familiar as much from the film versions of Tarzan as from the books: "culture hero as dupe or trickster" (A515.2),^ "helpful monkey" (B435) and "helpful lion"

(B443). A motif present throughout all of Burroughs' romances about

Tarzan is the "quest for adventure . . . this motif is prominent in

Romances of Chivalry" (H1221). "Abduction by animals" (R13) occurs not only to Tarzan but frequently to Jane and other heroines, and

"rescue of captive" (R110) takes place every chapter or two in the

Tarzan romances, as do "escapes and pursuits" (R200). "City of Gold" 63

(F761.1) is the major motif in Burroughs' Tarzan and the City of Gold

(1932 serial/1933 book) and in Fritz Leiber's Tarzan and the Golden

Valley (1966).

To use the "forest as refuge of eloping lovers" (R312.1) is what

Tarzan unsuccessfully attempts with Jane in Tarzan of the Apes-, the

Tarzan readership fairly demanded that the attempt be successful, so in the first of twenty-five sequels, The Return of Tarzan, the belated marriage of Tarzan and Jane takes place. And there is a

"treasure to be found by the man who marries original owner's daughter" (N543.3), which is exactly the course of action which takes place as Tarzan recovers the treasure belonging to Jane Porter’s father. By isolating the motifs which are present in both folklore and popular literature, it is possible to begin to establish the relationships that are the vital fibers of American culture. Motifs provide a common ground and indexing and formula studies provide common denominators for working in a cultural laboratory.

Works like John G. Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery, and Romance:

Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976), which build on myth and symbol scholarship, sit on the borderline on which the relationship of popular literature and culture rest. Cawelti's study may prove to be as pivotal to popular culture studies as Henry Nash

Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth was pivotal to American culture studies. Virgin Land includes popular culture studies—central to Smith's thesis is an examination of the dime novels, for instance--which were ignored for nearly a generation. 64

Scholarship in American culture studies during that generation tended

to focus on the myth and symbol aspects of elitist literature while

leaving dormant the popular literature.

In Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, Cawelti advances a methodology which seeks to provide substantiation for viewing, as his

subtitle indicates, "formula stories as art and popular culture."

His work certainly supports the premise that formula stories are important as art. But it is not entirely successful in fulfilling its promise of being important to culture studies for it falls short of substantiating cultural insights on the basis of the evidence provided by formula stories. Although he can show how formula stories may reflect particular cultural milieus, Cawelti, like all who have attempted to do so, is yet unable to produce a means of validating the assumption that formula stories actually do reflect or refract entire cultural milieus. What he is most successful in doing--advancing proof that escapist formula stories should be viewed as a form of literary expression embodying its own values and goals rather than as a form of inferior literature—is an important contribution to popular culture studies and to American culture studies.

It is the step which will build on Cawel.ti's success, however, that is ultimately most important. What is of interest here, therefore, is the theoretical basis on which Cawelti attempts to establish a relationship between literature and culture. The bias of

Adventure, Mystery, and Romance is weighted most heavily on the 65

literary half of the literature and culture dialectic, whereas the

present study is biased toward the cultural half. While Cawelti's

theoretical stance appears sound, his application of it to specific

examples is less so. A rehashing of the chapters in which Cawelti

himself applied his theoretical constructs to popular literature

genres will only reinforce the foregone conclusion concerning the

presence of artistic merit in formula stories. The present aim is to

interpret examples from a different body of formula stories, those of

Edgar Rice Burroughs. With only minimal attention to their artistic

and aesthetic merits, an attempt will be made to emphasize the

cultural aspects of these stories through an application of the

theories postulated by Cawelti.

The choice of using Burroughs' works seems natural both because

Cawelti does not deal with them in Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, - - - and because they are often acclaimed, or'denounced / as premier

examples of popular literature. The formulas most utilized by

Burroughs are not'included in Cawelti's discussion, in his second

chapter, of five popular literature formulas: adventure, romance, mystery, , and beings or alien states. Science

fiction is briefly mentioned—with little elaboration on its

components—under the category of alien beings or alien states. The

remaining categories do not include the formulas Burroughs operates with, for Burroughs is rarely melodramatic in Cawelti's definition of

the term, and very infrequently does he indulge in a romance in which

the focus is on the female's love relationship with the male. The 66

same is true of the mystery genre in which the focus is on the

discovery of a secret, a formula Burroughs does not emphasize in his

early twentieth-century romances.

In his study of the period between World War One and the Great

Depression, the period in which Burroughs perfected his major

formulas, Roderick Nash writes that

Tarzan of the Apes has probably sold more copies to date (over five million) than any other American book . . . For people vaguely repressed by civilization, Tarzan was a potent symbol for freedom, power, and individuality. A new wild man on a new frontier, Tarzan helped sustain traditional American values.10

As an intellectual historian, Nash is accepting in The Nervous

Generation: American Thought, 1917-1930 (1970) the possibility of a

relationship between formula stories and the culture which produced

them. Doing so in this case supports his contention that many people

clung to the familiar ideas and ideals as presented by popular

authors like Burroughs. The watershed supposedly produced in

intellectual circles by World War 0ne--like the throwing off of

nineteenth-century Victorian mores--was not necessarily the

culture-wide one that it has appeared to be in most elitist

representations of the era.

While Nash makes no methodological inroads into the ways in which such contentions can be validated, Cawelti carefully distinguishes between what he sees as the available approaches to the

relationship between literature and culture. After looking first at

the way in which Cawelti views his approach in relation to other possible approaches, the present study will venture to set forth 67

those definitions and constructs which make up Cawelti's theoretical

framework concerning formula stories. These constructs will then be

applied to Burroughs' formula stories.

Cawelti characterizes the three major approaches to the study of

literature and culture as the "impact or effect theories," the

"deterministic theories," and the "symbolic or reflective theories."11 By discussing all three he attempts to draw out the

methodological differences and similarities which distinguish his

approach from other contemporary approaches. While Cawelti would not

intentionally sever his discussion of literature from a consideration

of audience--he is too much the culturalist to do that--neither does

his approach place a premium upon the audience's reaction to the

works themselves. He acknowledges this as a weakness, but rejects

the "impact or effect theories" on the basis that, although the

impact must exist, it cannot be accurately measured in either an

immediate or a long-term sense until a more sophisticated

interweaving of social scientific and humanistic techniques takes

place. By working both in and across fields like history and

literature, Cawelti does attempt to move beyond the strictures of

disciplines. While each discipline has its own perspective on

culture, Cawelti takes the stand that a culturalist scholar needs more than one of these perspectives to begin to see clearly what the

cultural significance of the material really is. The far more

complicated and diffuse "deterministic theories" are also rejected by

Cawelti. These theories come primarily from the inter-related 68

traditions of Marxism, Naturalism and the-Freudian/Jungian school of psychology. Determinism includes Behaviorism as well as the

Fatalism of writers like Theodore Dreiser whose American Tragedy

(1925), for instance, represents the protagonist Clyde Griffiths as never having a clear choice in his fatal movement from one tragedy to the next, a path culminating finally in his destruction. The limits of application of these forms of thought make them unsuitable to

Cawelti's purposes, particularly the attempts to reduce all behavior to an overwhelming force outside of the individual, and the "tendency to reduce literary experience to other forms of behavior" (p. 25).

Thus, of the three major approaches concerned with the inter-relationship between a culture and its literature, Cawelti step by step rejects the first two until he can place himself firmly in the strain of thought he calls the "symbolic or reflective theories."

This myth-symbol tradition draws heavily on the Romantic

Movement's concept of culture with the central Romantic idea of mythos being very similar to the concept on which the myth-symbol approach is premised. Some of the Romantic ideas which were drafted and modified to provide the foundation of the American culture studies myth-symbol school are the prevalence of democratic attitudes, the emphasis on national or cultural boundaries, the recognition of the values of folklore collection, and an emphasis upon mythological rather than logical thinking which capitalizes primarily upon the study of literature and language. The tremendous influence of the Romantic concept of culture can be seen in relation 69

to Cawelti's "four interrelated hypotheses about the dialectic

between formulaic literature and the culture that produces and enjoys

it":

1) Formula stories affirm existing interests and attitudes by presenting an imaginary world that is aligned with these interests and attitudes. ... 2) Formulas resolve tensions and ambiguities resulting from the conflicting interests of different groups within the culture or from ambiguous attitudes toward particular values. ... 3) Formulas enable the audience to explore in fantasy the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden and to experience in a carefully controlled way the possibility of stepping across this boundary. ... 4) Finally, 1iterary formulas assist in the process of assimilating changes in values to traditional imaginative constructs, (pp. 35-36)

Such connections between literature and the culture are not always clearly explained, Cawelti admits, andin some cases’;are to be taken on faith because they cannot be explained. Cawelti makes this admission even after a decade of working toward the resolution of such enigmas because, he acknowledges, it is impossible to meet all of the major criticisms of any approach to literature or culture studies.

Allowing for limitations in his preferred theory, Cawelti counters before they are leveled at him the objections raised by Bruce Kuklick 12 in his article, "Myth and Symbol in American Studies." While agreeing with the validity of some of Kuklick's objections concerning the vagaries of myth, Cawelti sees the result of taking Kuklick's criticism to its logical extreme as running methodology back to the impact theories. To resolve this conflict, Cawelti offers the following ideas: 70

The resolution of the problems posed by these criticisms of the myth-symbol approach lies, I think, in replacing the inevitably vague and ambiguous notion of myth with a conception of literary structures that can be more precisely defined and are consequently less dependent on such implicit metaphysical assumptions as that of a realm of superpersonal ideas, which Kuklick rightly objects to. (p. 29)

Cawelti is also inadvertently coping with another recent criticism of

the myth-symbol school, this one promulgated by R. Gordon Kelly in an 13 article titled "Literature and the Historian." Kelly's critical

position is that a concept of culture is needed prior to the effective implementation of the myth-symbol approach. In dealing with a specific art form produced by a particular group of people for a particular group of people, Cawelti has indeed selected specific cultural areas on which to concentrate his efforts and on which to make tentative cultural assumptions concerning applicable concepts dealing with the popular culture he is investigating.

Cawelti's background is not atypical of scholars now working in popular culture studies since he arrived via American studies and, before that, English. This academic position-shifting helps explain why his subject is theory as much as it is literature. The overriding jconcern for theory--for new methods to approach both old and new materials and concepts--have served to direct some scholars away from traditional humanistic and social scientific disciplines in which such theoretical concerns are secondary or, perhaps stated more fairly, not;so critical. Often these position-shifting scholars move into the relatively recent enterprises of American culture studies and popular culture studies in which the state of theory and 71

methodology is in flux. This flux, however, as witnessed to by the

Journal of Popular Culture’s special issue on "Theories and

Methodologies in Popular Culture (Fall 1975), has the attribute of

encouraging an active, on-going, scholarly debate.

That Cawelti has moved beyond the major myth-symbol works is

represented by his moving from American studies into popular culture

studies. The myth-symbol school of American studies is, however, the

tradition with which he is most closely allied academically. One of

the ways in which he has moved beyond the myth-symbol school is that

he has brought his studies up to the present instead of cutting them

off around the turn of the century. Although Cecil F. Tate, in The

Search for a Method in American Studies (1973), does not seem to find .

this bothersome, it is true that all four of the major

representatives he discusses from the myth-symbol school--Roy Harvey

Pearce's The Continuity of American Poetry (1961), John William

Ward's Andrew Jackson, Symbol for an Age (1955), R.W.B. Lewis' The

American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth

Century (1955), and the work which started the school on its way,

Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth

(1950)—deal primarily with the nineteenth century. Only Pearce's

The Continuity of American Poetry goes substantially beyond the

nineteenth century. While these books are not intended to be all-

inclusive of the myth-symbol school's efforts, they are oftentimes

treated as the standard works even though they leave out the equally

important The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral 72

Ideal in America (1964)—also dealing exclusively with the nineteenth century—by the recent President of the American Studies Association,

Leo Marx, and a work being done contemporaneously with Tate's,

Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the

American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973).

Cawelti, furthermore, represents a momentous break with what has been a cliquish affair among the major myth-symbol writers. During the fifties and early sixties there was a Harvard-Amherst-Minnesota triangle which in various ways directly influenced all of these myth-symbol writers. One of the numerous such connections is that

Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx were colleagues at Minnesota and Marx directed John William Ward's dissertation. Cecil F. Tate's book on the myth-symbol school—and beyond—is published, appropriately, by the University of Minnesota Press. Cawelti, like Betty Chmaj and her multi-mediated myth-symbol expositions, is a maverick representing a new stage of maturity in the myth-symbol tradition.

In some respects, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance is an elaboration of ideas and a sophistification of techniques already set forth in works such as Cawelti's The Six-Gun Mystique (1970), and, earlier, in Apostles of the Self-Made Man (1965). With enlightening results, Cawelti attempts to define in Apostles of the Self-Made Man the changing popular concepts of success in America by investigating major personalities as they are portrayed in sources ranging from success manuals to novels. Already he is working on the significance of the idea that popular novels, for instance, reveal numerous covert 73

as well as overt authorial positions. This becomes an important

contention in relation to formula stories in which the statement

being made in a single work is often senseless, or only in part

sensible, until it is put into the context of other works of a

similar nature. Thus, the necessity of studying samples in relation

to a body of works, such as will be done shortly with Burroughs'

Tarzan series, rather than an isolated work. This is a crucial

contention in Adventure, Mystery, and Romanee:

The concept of formula as I have defined it is a means of generalizing the characteristics of large groups of individual works from certain combinations of cultural materials and archetypal story patterns. It is useful primarily as a means of making historical and cultural inferences about the collective fantasies shared by large groups of people and of identifying differences in these fantasies from one culture or period to another, (p. 7)

Such formulas must repeat in fiction some of the meaningful patterns

of thought and action within the culture.

These formula stories rely upon two major literary patterns, the

first being conventional epithets, similies, and metaphors and, thus,

"any form of cultural commonly found in literature"

(p. 5). This pattern is demonstrated by the equating of women's hair colors with varieties of sexiness in specific periods of time and in specific cultural settings. Such equivalences tend to change over the course of time so that, Cawelti adds, the association of a blond-haired woman with purity, for instance, eventually gives way to a blond-haired woman as the embodiment of sexual attractions.

The second literary pattern concerns the plots which transcend 74

• parti cular eras and "particuTar cul,tures)so"that, thé "popul ar s tory

patterns are embodiments of archetypal story forms in terms of

specific cultural materials" (p. 6); or, to state it with a slightly

different emphasis, "formulas are ways in which specific cultural

themes and stereotypes become embodied in more universal story

archetypes" (p. 6). On this level, formulas are similar to genres in

the sense of, say, the genre of the" western; but they are not similar

to genres in the sense of the essay or drama form, or in the sense of

the tragedy or convention.

It should be possible to hint at what is or is not useful in the

approach set forth by Cawelti; and, more specifically, it should be

possible to isolate the factors which Burroughs mastered in his

formula literature and to show how they are, or are not, carried out

in the sections of his works examined on the following pages. The major emphasis will be on Burroughs' Tarzan and the Ant Men. A

summary of its storyline is as follows:

An impersonator of Tarzan of the Apes, the Spaniard Esteban

Miranda, murders the Russian Kraski for a bag of diamonds originally stolen from Tarzan. When the tale begins, Miranda is a captive of

the Obebe villagers who cannot determine whether he is man or god, whether he is Tarzan of the Apes or The River Devil, both of whom he impersonates at his whimsy. The primitive setting for the story is established in the first sentence of the book:

In the filth of a dark hut, in the villege of Obebe the cannibal, upon the banks of the Ugogo, Esteban Miranda squatted upon his haunches and gnawed upon the remnants of a half-cooked fish. (p. 5) 75

Miranda escapes from the black cannibals in the vicinity of the Great

Thorn Forest. The plotting begins when he is severely injured by a blow to the head administered by a black girl he kidnapped from the

Obebe village. Mistaken for Tarzan, Tarzan's family (Jane, , and , wife of Korak), care for the deranged impersonator.

Meanwhile, Tarzan's afternoon of recreation piloting a bi-plane had resulted in his discovery of the Great Thorn Forest which had served as a barrier to intrusion from the ground. Caught up in examining this strange lost land, Tarzan allows the bi-plane to skim across the treetops. The crash is inevitable, for the plot must go on, and when he awakens, Tarzan has lost his memory. A member of the all-female Alali tribe finds Tarzan and takes him to her cave. These giant women are speechless and weaponless savages who enslave the much smaller wild men of their race until Tarzan inspires the males to rebel against this upsetting change in the nature of the male-female relationship.' The reader learns that

The hideous life of the Alalus was the natural result of the unnatural reversal of sex dominance. It is the province of the male to initiate love and by his masterfulness to inspire first respect, then admiration in the breast of the female he seeks to attract, (p. 27)

Failing that, violent conquest will work as well for, after instilling in the males a sense of sexual pride, Tarzan prods them to take vengeance on the females with the weapons he has furnished them the know-how to make and use.

Tarzan escapes from the repressive giant women, too, but it is to another lost race that he turns for his next adventure. By saving 76

the prince of an eighteen-inch-tall people called

Trohanadalmakusians from a seven-foot-tall Alalus woman, Tarzan

assures himself of a warm welcome as guest of the king of Minuni

land. Joining in the Trohanadalmakusian war with the

Veltopismakusians--in which the cavalry of this white race of Ant Men

ride Pygmy Royal Antelopes—Tarzan is captured by the rival

Veltopismakusians.in the battle of the Hill of Gartolas. He is soon

slated to be experimented on by Zoanthrohago, a wizard/scientist who

changes Tarzan's stature to that of the Ant Men. When in the domed

city's lower levels with the slaves, Tarzan is befriended by

Talaskar, a beautiful young woman who transforms her face into that

of a hideous hag to avoid being made mistress to a member of the

Veltopismakusian ruling class. Of course, Talaskar is enslaved

royalty for she is the daughter of King Talaskhago from yet another

warring nation of Ant Men, Mandalmakus.

Numerous coincidental meetings keep the plot of Tarzan and the

Ant Men moving in typical Burroughsian fashion. Princess Janzara,

daughter of the King of Veltopismakus, is eventually matched with the

wizard, Zoanthrohago; Princess Talaskar is matched with

Komodoflorensal, the son of the King of Trohanadalmakus whom Tarzan

saved early on. Tarzan finally escapes from the and then

from the land of the Minuni. He returns to his family just in time

to expose the deranged impersonator who has regained consciousness

and is beginning to assert his fraudulent authority as Tarzan of the

Apes. 77

The themes, plot, and characterizations in Tarzan and the Ant

Men are typically Burroughsian, though it is perhaps one of

Burroughs' best adventure tales. The story summary just given provides a suitable context in which to view Cawelti's most succinct discussion of the formula story:

The world of a formula can be described as an archetypal story pattern embodied in the images, symbols, themes, and myths of a particular culture. As shaped by the imperatives of the experience of escape, these formulaic worlds are constructions that can be described as moral fantasies constituting an imaginary world in which the audience can encounter a maximum of excitement without being confronted with an overpowering sense of the insecurity and danger that accompany such forms of excitement in reality. Much of the artistry of formulaic literature involves the creator's ability to plunge us into a believable kind of excitement while, at the same time, confirming our confidence that in the formulaic world things always work out as we want them to. (p. 16)

Burroughs' imaginary lost worlds like the land of Minuni beyond the

Great Thorn Forest are often both sophisticated and satisfactory.

This is due in part to several literary devices essential for the skillful manipulation of formula stories, devices which Cawelti terms "suspense, identification, and the creating of a slightly removed imaginary world" (pp. 16-17). These three literary devices provide the initial thrust in establishing the context in which to discuss Tarzan and the Ant Men. Some modification of emphasis is necessary, however. Where Cawelti has used the word "suspense," the present discussion will extend into a larger consideration of plot; where Cawelti has employed the concept of "identification," the present discussion will approach identification with a story's characters and situations in relation to the broad patterns of 78

characterization Burroughs uses; and finally, the third device, "the

creating of a slightly removed, imaginary world," will be expanded

into a broader discussion of the themes and motifs utilized by

Burroughs in the works being considered.

There are two important aspects of plot in Tarzan and the Ant

Men which should be separated. These are the frame which Burroughs

established for telling the story and the techniques of advancing the

plot which Burroughs tended to repeat in many of his romances.

Tarzan and the Ant Men contains two stories, both presented by a

third-person narrator. Esteban Miranda's villainy occupies the black

Africans and Tarzan's family while Tarzan ventures into a lost land

peopled with both a huge and a tiny lost race. Miranda's story provides the frame—it is what introduces and concludes the romance— and Tarzan's story provides the substance of the romance.

While the plot structure is neatly packaged in Tarzan and the

Ant Men, the conventions which advance the plot are eclectic:

Talaskar is several times kidnapped and rescued; both Tarzan and

Talaskar are usually in the process of being captured or of making their escape;,and there are frequent separations and reunions. The convention of having a character who is lost, in this case Tarzan, wander from place to place provides the avenue for the introduction of many new settings and characters. All of these conventional processes represent physical movement or action, the crux of adventure stories. They provide for the violence and excitement of chases, the encountering of recurrent dangers, and the combatting of 79

foes on a regular schedule. The most frequent device used by

Burroughs to sustain plot movement is coincidence: Miranda is injured where he can conveniently be found by Tarzan's family, and

Tarzan just happens to be nearby when the time comes to save

Komodoflorensal from the Alali or Talaskar from the slave masters.

Escape literature such as this will "necessarily stress intense and immediate kinds of excitement and gratification" (p. 14), and

Burroughs employs)a simple dialectic which can be construed axiomatically in regard to the conventions: if the hero is captured, he will escape; if the hero and heroine are separated, they will be reunited; if the heroine is kidnapped, she will be rescued. There cannot normally be a situation in which, for instance, the hero is lost and never finds his way back. An exception which comes to mind immediately is the ending of Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot

(1918 serial/1924 book).

Caspak, the land that time forgot, is a lush, jungle environment where Bowen J. Tyler, Jr. (the narrator of this story), finds himself in 1916. Tyler, the son of a shipbuilder specializing in submarines, is on his way to fight in . The unarmed and defenseless

American ship he is on is torpedoed by a U-boat. On the same ship is

Lys La Rue who is on her way to Europe to find her fiance, a German

Navy Lieutenant. After several battles, the Tyler forces take the

U-33, capturing Lys' fiance, the Baron Friedrich von Schoenvorts.

Having designed it, Tyler knows how to operate the submarine. On their return to the United States, however, the U-33 is sabotaged by a 80

Wobbly (a member of the I.W.W., the International Workers of the

World), Benson, and the submarine drifts to Caspak.

The Germans and the Anglo-Americans team up to fight the new

unknown, leaving the Great War to the outer world. Fort is

built and occupied and Ahm, the man, befriends them. Ahm wants to become a Galu, the advanced human being. There are also the

Grimaldi, negroid whites, and the Alalus (as in Tarzan and the Ant

Men), who are a speechless and weaponless tribe of women. Lys is kidnapped by the primitive Tsa and the Boches break their pact with the Anglo-Americans, shelling the fort and stealing the U-33.

Abandoned, all the Anglo-Americans are killed except Tyler who finally recaptures Lys from Tsa (and others). They remain on Caspak, for Bowen's manuscript is found in a bottle upon the sea.

Perhaps in anticipation of a sequel, the hero is left stranded in Caspak. True to the normal pattern, however, the hero is united with the heroine. In the last paragraph of the book, before sex could become a factor, Bowen J. Tyler and Lys La Rue carry out their betrothel on the cliffs of Caspak in Byronic style:

That night the clouds broke, and the shone down upon our little ledge; and there, hand in hand, we turned our faces toward heaven and plighted our troth beneath the eyes of God. No human agency could have married us more sacredly than we are wed. We are man and wife, and we are content.14

This Burroughs passage compel Is comparison to the powerful pastoral passage by Lord Byron in Don Juan when he describes the idyllic love of Don Juan and Haidee: 81

And now't was done--on the lone shore were plighted Their hearts; the stars, their nuptial torches, shed Beauty upon the beautiful they lighted: Ocean their witness, and the cave their bed, By their own feelings hallowed and united, Their priest was Solitude, and they were wed: And they were happy--for to their young eyes Each was an angel, and earth Paradise.15

The conclusion of Bowen's narrative appears to have been influenced

by Don Juan, as if Burroughs had just read the early Cantos

concerning Byron's Haidee episode: both settings are on an island

where the pair are stranded in primitive circumstances which isolate

them from the entrapments of civilization, both pairs represent Adam

and Eve figures, and most strikingly similar of all are the images, 16 the tone, and even some of the words and phrases. Not overly

indulgent in the inclusion of sex in his work, Burroughs relied

frequently on the sort of attraction/repulsion dialectic experienced

by Bowen and Lys when she feels at one point that he betrayed her.

As in this case, the repulsion is usually felt toward the hero on the

part of the heroine in a Burroughs romance, rather than the other way

around. Perhaps it is unnecessary to state, but that is typical of

the situations Don Juan finds himself in as well.

In a Burroughs romance like The Land That Time Forgot or Tarzan and the Ant Men there is usually adequate suspense brought about by

the pacing of the episodes as well. There is the ever present

inspiration that new adventures are always just around the bend in

the forest for the characters and on the next page or two of the book

for the readers. There are, of course, stretches in these romances which are unchallenging or relatively inactive, but the reader is 82

conditioned to recognize that the lapse is temporary and, as a form

of anticipation, that the lull is going to inevitably enhance the

intensity of the next challenge.

The uses to which Burroughs put the framing device and the conventions for forwarding the plot are typical of the formula

stories categorized as adventure stories by Cawelti. Insofar as

Tarzan and the Ant Men is an exemplary work by Burroughs, it

represents the essence of the adventure story with the addition of science fantasy or technological elements like Zoanthrohago's wizardry and Tarzan's ingress to the lost land via a bi-plane. In the adventure story the central fantasy is plot-oriented so that it is "the hero—individual or group-overcoming obstacles and dangers and accomplishing some important and moral mission" (p. 39). With its focus on the hero and the obstacle, according to Cawelti, the adventure is the oldest, simplest, and most popular story type.

Adventure stories can present ordinary characters in extraordinary worlds, like Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)or they can present a hero with "extraordinary capacities" in ordinary circumstances. The former Cawelti calls mimetic fiction (fiction which reflects reality), and the latter he calls moral fantasy or formula literature which proceeds to construct "an ideal world without the disorder, the ambiguity, the uncertainty, and the limitations of the world of our experience" (p. 13). Much of

Burroughs' work definitely leans toward the moral fantasy even though the ventures of his heroes lead to lost continents like Caspak, or 83

lost cities like those in the land of the Minuni, which are as

extraordinary as settings within the in Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland.

Beyond the plot is the second major literary device to be

included here, that of characterization. In a formula story like

Tarzan and the Ant Men, only the major figures have enough

characterization to warrant discussion. Superficially, at least, even the major figures are but neatly cut outlines of characters:

Tarzan is the strong and handsome white man; Talaskar is the young and beautiful virgin princess, the daughter of the King of

Mandalmakus; Miranda is traitorous, a ruthlessly ambitious villain.

Stereotypes all of them, it is amazing that they do "work," that they do blend so easily into the romance, neither calling undue attention to their one-dimensionality nor ever coming up short of what is expected in the line-up of characteristics for a major Burroughsian figure.

The reason for this may be in the secondary nature of Burroughs' characterization. The action is primary and the characterization is developed only insofar /as it will enhance the action. The only reason the reader is given information like the fact that Tarzan retains his super powers, despite his diminutive size; is to heighten the immediate appreciation that might be brought to the reader's involvement in the fictional battle in which this factor turns the tide. Too many details about a character apparently would be digressive or distracting. Certainly the knowledgeable reader of 84

Burroughs' work does not expect or want to find images of the heroine washing dishes or of the hero digging the pit for an outhouse. And neither does the reader of Burroughs' work want the "distraction" of sex, apparently, for a short embrace is as much passion of this nature as will be found in the kissless and sexless world of Tarzan and the Ant Men.

Most readers of Burroughs find an "identity" through the reading of a romance like Tarzan and the Ant Men. Readers perhaps would otherwise either read something else or elect to read nothing at all.

This reader identity can be with the contents of the work itself— with the characters usually, but at times with the situations, too— or with the exhilaration of writing along with the author, i.e., of creating this "slightly removed, imaginary world" from the same perspective that Burroughs held from behind his pen. Less abstractly, identification with a character, usually it is the hero in a Burroughs romance, comes about primarily because the one-dimensionality of the hero is aligned with the trait of virtuousness while the one-dimensionality of the villain is aligned with the forces of evil or corruption. As a result of this most basic conflict between good and evil the reader identifies with

Tarzan because he is both abstractly the incarnation of good and concretely the purveyor of good when, for example, he thrashes the slave master after having saved Talaskar from defilement at the hands of this villain.

While the characterizations by Burroughs are clear-cut and 85

thoroughly stereotyped, of more interest in terms of potential for

formula studies is the observation by Cawelti that

the ultimate test of a truly vitalized stereotype is the degree to which it becomes an , thereby transcending its particular cultural moment and maintaining an interest for later generations and other cultures, (p. 11)

Burroughs' attraction as one of the most popular authors of all time

indicates a vitality which has carried his characters live down to

the present in nearly all areas of the world. There is something

archetypal in the stock hero which Burroughs uses over and over

again, something which is basic to the human quest for creating

supermen to rule, and basic to the human quest for creating Byronic

heroes to worship. Tarzan is the of this stereotype.

There are other aspects of characterization which are more

appropriately dealt with under the last of the three major literary

devices, that of the themes and motifs which permeate Burroughs'

"slightly removed, imaginary world" in Tarzan and the Ant Men. These

include the sub-human characters which are more important for their

function symbolically in the work than for their characterization per se. The race of wild men repressed by the Alalu women, for example, are intended to function as contrasts for the highly civilized Ant

Men.; A theme which is repeated often in Burroughsian worlds is the conflict between the superior and inferior races who vie for domination of a territory.

The preoccupation with race permeates not only Tarzan and the

Ant Men, but nearly everything which Burroughs wrote. The ways in which he wove such personal concerns into formulas--!ike the fact 86

that the only black Africans in Tarzan and the Ant Men are cannibals and devil worshippers—can be cited as examples of how his stories are cultural reflectors based upon general concerns and attitudes filtering through American culture. As one of the influential race propagandists of his era, Burroughs appears to be reflecting rather acutely the saturation of racially-inspired ideologies in American culture during the first half of the twentieth century. This topic will be returned to shortly when a comparison of Burroughs' stereotypical racial attitudes is made to similar attitudes present in works by Vachel Lindsay and Eugene O'Neill.

It is appropriate at this point to consider for a moment an assumption which must be neglected in a study of this nature in order to allow critical free reign. This assumption is that formulaic stories are, as Cawelti states it, "artistic constructions created for the purpose of enjoyment and pleasure" (p. 2). Burroughs, quite simply, saw himself as an entertainer who had a gift for adding the impulsive element to his fiction, or, as calls the 18 products of this gift, "sheer romantic impossibility." This objective of the author needs to be made clear. Critical extrapolation of more from Burroughs' works than their escapist intentions, designed for relaxation rather than provocation, may result in an impasse to scholarly edification. An over-reliance on the analysis of the formulaic aspects of Burroughs' romances tends to be like cooking the flesh from the chicken and then, instead of imbibing the delicious broth, proceeding to look only at the 87

unsightly skeleton which occupies the center of the carving table.

Whereas Cawelti's emphasis is upon literature in the cultural

context, the emphasis here has been on the cultural context itself

rather than the literature; Burroughs' romances have not been looked at as literature per se, but as cultural documents. Burroughs was not a creative artist in the sense of initiating the basic conventions he made use of, although he certainly embellished these conventions and came up with some startlingly effective ones of his own. Assuredly, he was creative in the sense that he had the talent to plug into a storytelling tradition and to tell those stories well.

And he brought philosophical and mythical considerations down to the

Everyperson level, which is certainly one of his greatest contributions to American culture.

These contributions, and the formulaic elements with which they are fashioned, are the materials with which an index to the Tarzan series may be built. In addition to those of formula studies, detailed indexing should provide insights into where these connections between the popular literature artifacts and culture can be made. In relation to the Tarzan series, these connections may eventually provide evidence concerning the significance of American attitudes toward Africa, toward Afro-Americans, and toward white supermen like Tarzan of the Apes. Perhaps it is an ethnocentric oversight, for instance, that Stith Thompson formulated a motif for

"Negro cannibal" (Gil.4) but not for "Anglo cannibal," of which there have certainly been more than a few in literature and lore! Jonathan 88

Swift's famous essay, "A Modest Proposal" (1729), stands out in this regard, as do the infamous doings of the American Party in the

Rocky Mountains; Mark Twain wrote of Anglo in in a story, narrated by a monomaniac, called "Cannibalism in the ," and frequently the specter of Anglos eating Anglos is raised in popular literature like Burroughs' romances.

The present concern with popular literature is not with the external indexing of works as found in library card catalogs, for instance, or with a checklist index Tike the Hero-Pulp Index (1970) which Lohr McKinstry and Robert Weinberg have compiled and, in compliment to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan series, published at the

Opar Press. It is what internal indexing of the contents of the works themselves can reveal that is of major concern, although an index which is a thorough exploration of the internal workings of a series like Tarzan should naturally be, like Stith Thompson's work, accessible for comparison purposes.

It is a frequent claim among professional collectors that Edgar

Rice Burroughs is the most collected author ever, and that anything to do with Tarzaniana is marketable. Certainly Burroughs is one of the most popular American authors, and almost certainly the series based on Tarzan of the ¿pes—spawner of over two dozen sequels and hundreds of imitators--is the most popular series, in terms of sales, by an American author. Of the twenty-six Tarzan books, remarkably, twenty-four have been in print continuously since 1963; the other two—TTze Tarzan Twins (1927) and Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins with 89

jad-bal-ja, the Golden Lion (1936)—are books of kiddie stories which

are the apparent exceptions to the claim about marketable Tarzaniana.

Possibly persistent popularity has led to the recognition that

the Tarzan series of Edgar Rice Burroughs is more important than was

previously realized. That books by Burroughs are increasingly attractive as subjects of investigation by scholars is suggested by recent works like Richard A. Lupoff's Edgar Riee Burroughs: Master of

Adventure (1968), Michael Paul Orth's dissertation, "Tarzan's

Revenge: A Literary Biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs" (1973), and the official biography of Burroughs by Irwin Porges, Edgar Riee

Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (1975). These works reinforce the need for more serious consideration of Burroughs' pulpish productions which include over ninety books.

Along with the upswing in interest in studying popular authors like Burroughs has come more interest in indexing the works of popular authors generally. The approaches and emphases vary in this new breed of indexes. Philip A. Shreffler's The H.P. Loveeraft

Companion (1977) is a recent index for an author who began writing at same time as Burroughs. Shreffler's is a companion in the finest sense of being complementary without usurping the material being examined; Lovecraft's stories grow through his criticism rather than being devoured by it. The indexing aspect of Shreffler's work includes a guide to Lovecraft's monsters and gods which combines brief descriptions with notations as to the stories in which the monsters and gods appear. 90

The seventies have produced two indexes to the works of J.R.R.

Tolkien. The first is Robert Foster's A Guide to Middle-Earth

(1971). Four years in the making, this concordance for the three

volumes of The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), The Hobbit (1937), The

Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1961), and The Road Goes Ever Cm (1961),

is based on a factual, literal reading of Tolkien with a dutiful and conscientious indexing of people, places, events, and lots of miscellany. Foster includes little anecdotal material, and little in

the way of speculation or extrapolation.

In contrast is J.E.A. Tyler's The Tolkien Companion (1976) which takes more liberties with the same series of Tolkien works. Tyler accepts with a straight face Tolkien's claim to be the translator rather than the author of the works of Frodo Baggins the Hobbit. By taking such liberties Tyler adds his portion of creativity to the

Tolkien canon. Revealing both his humorous tack and the purpose of his indexing project, Tyler writes in his Preface that

sooner or later he [Tolkien] would have applied himself with his customary diligence to the lesser but ultimately necessary process of organising the factual material revealed by his [Tolkien's] translations into some form of comprehensive index or concordance—if only for the sake of persons who, faced with a plethora of names and words with which they are not familiar, rapidly discover a need for such an aid.19

Obviously, Tyler is having fun by presenting such an outrageous but plausible premise. And just as obviously, it is a modification of

Tyler's approach, rather than Foster's, which is most applicable to an indexing project for the Tarzan series.

Tyler presents a thorough list of names through a logical means 91

of organization which makes it more accessible to the reader. He enters the meaning of the names and it is his boast that he has

"endeavoured to postulate likely historical significances, based on 20 all known facts, where Tolkien has not done so." Such postulating results in an intriguing work which illustrates well that there is a need in the indexing business for more than facts, for more than a science of astronomy with which to explore the universe.

In line with this thought, two indexers of works by Burroughs create more fictions out of the fiction with which they are working.

John Flint Roy's A Guide to Barsoom: Eleven Sections of References in

One Volume Dealing with the Stories Written by Edgar Rice

Burroughs (1976) suggests that Burroughs told his life story in the

Martian, or Barsoomian, stories. Among the most readable of guides,

Roy's includes several indexes to place names, people names, plants and animals, quotations, and a general glossary of odds and ends. It includes, in prose, a pre-John Carter history and a detailed geography of Barsoom, as well as conversion charts for money, time and distance should one venture a trip to Barsoom. Far more than a concordance, Roy's book is a fun way to extend one's reading pleasure beyond the eleven books about Barsoom that Burroughs wrote. The other index of Burroughs' work is Philip Jos/ Farmer's

Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke (1912.).

Postulating that the real Tarzan, or Lord Greystoke, is still alive, and that Burroughs simply fictionalized Tarzan's life so that it could be presented to the public without imposing on Tarzan's 92

privacy, Farmer builds an elaborate biographical sketch for Tarzan based upon the events in the twenty-six Tarzan books. While not strictly an index, it is a narrative which presents easy access to particular themes like the relationship between Tarzan and La noted earlier. It is also done in the spirit of fun-making when dealing with popular entertainments like the Tarzan series.

As a catalog, the proposed index to the Tarzan series should contain multitudes. For the gratification of Tarzan buffs, the index will contain important ephemera which contribute to the themes which so many Americans have appreciated and identified with in the twentieth century. Certainly those themes which mainstream American studies scholarship has found most fertile thus far are also applicable to the Tarzan myth. These include, among many others,

American culture's collective fantasies associated with the American

Adam, a virgin land, the machine in the garden, a people of plenty, and a regeneration through violence.

This type of index should have entries with an integrity of their own as good descriptive prose, as interesting information about

Tarzan and his adventures, and as anecdotal entertainments. The appeal of an indexing project of this nature is that it could conceivably be the most creative and original approach to working with a popular literature series like Tarzan. By juxtaposing information, by creating new orders of thought and images, the entries in such an index should aid in comprehension and appreciation of Tarzan. Thus, they should stand as something of value in and of 93

themselves, as well as something which will contribute to a better understanding of American popular culture. The Dum Dum, for

instance, is described by Tarzan's friend, Paul D'Arnot, in Tarzan and the Forbidden City (1938 serial/1938 book), as "a rite older than the human race, the tiny germ from which all religious observances have sprung" (p. 64). The following is a sample entry describing the

Dum Dum in more detail (the numbers at the end designate the Tarzan books/chapters in which the subject of the entry plays a part):

DUM DUM: A major dance ritual, of the apes in which the challenge and hunt is reenacted. After silent obeisance by the ape tribe during the day, the Dum Dum begins at dusk with a tapping which increases to a rhythmic din and culminates in a savage orgy reminiscent of Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo" and Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. Included is the Death Dance in which the apes attack a Bolgani corpse with clubs before devouring its pulpish remains. The Dum Dum is performed in a natural amphitheater with earthen drums. In addition to his frequent participation in the Dum Dum, including the Death Dance, Tarzan returns to the amphitheater to rebury the Porter Party's treasure chest and, later, to provide Jane Porter with an innocent Edenic refuge. (1/7-8; 1/11; 1/17; 1/20; 1/25; 3/8; 4/8; 6/4; 6/10; 6/12; 7/8-10; 14/8; 14/12; 20/8; 20/11)

Similar entries fashioned for D'Arnot, Jane, Korak, Pellucidar,

Waziri, and hundreds of other subjects would provide a format for seed thoughts and speculations; such entries would provide not only a means of knowing and understanding the subject as it is found in the

Tarzan series, but a means of knowing and understanding elements of

American culture which are fostered in the Tarzan series.

To return to the formulaic considerations of racial stereotyping broached near the end of the discussion of Cawelti's formula studies,

Africa had caught the imagination of Americans long before Burroughs 94

wrote Tarzan of the Apes. The immensely popular In Darkest Africa:

Or, The Quest, Rescue, and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria

(1891), by Henry Morton Stanley, featured such exoticisms from his

travels as the phalanx dance with thousands of participants whose

"regular stamp of the feet" had the result that the "firm and hard 21 earth echoed the sound round about tremulously." It is his

description of the dancers themselves, however, which probably had

the greatest impact on the spreading of outlandish stereotypes about

black Africans:

Dancing in Africa mainly consists of rude buffoonery, extravagant gestures, leaping and contortions of the body, while one or many drums keep time. There is always abundance of noise and loud laughter, and it serves the purpose of furnishing amusement to the barbarians, as the dervish-like whirling and pirouetting give to civilised people. Often two men step out of a semicircle of their fellow villagers, and a duet to the sound of a drum or a horn amid universal clapping of hands, or one performs a solo while dressed most fantastically in cocks' feathers, strings of rattling gourds, small globular bells, and heaps of human, monkey, and teeth, which are the African jewels.22

This report by a man who had been to Africa and witnessed that of which he wrote is hardly less misleading than what Burroughs, who did not visit Africa, composed about black Africans. For Burroughs' generation the Congo in particular came to epitomize the darkest, most savage, locale in Africa. Playwrights capitalized on the opportunity to exploit the shadowy images of the Dark Continent, which many Americans accepted as real and concrete, by producing plays with such titles as Voodoo (no date on production; printed in

1914) by Henry F. Downing, the one-act Death Dance (produced in 1923) 95

by Thelma Duncan, and the musical Savage Rhythm (produced in 1931) by 23 Norman Foster and Harry Hamilton. The most famous of this

nature is by one of America's most prestigious; playwrights, and

Eugene O'Neill's play is hardly different from the unflattering norm.

The Emperor Jones (1921) is certainly as exploitive of Afro-Americans

and Africans as the plays of the third rate playwrights. Though

mechanically competent, it utilizes all the weary stereotypes that

appeal to Anglo-Americans, including superstitious natives who

finally kill the Pullman porter-turned-emperor with silver bullets.

Ghosts like a razor-toting crap player and haunts like the "Little

Formless Fears" bother him in a forest so dark that he feared to go

into it. He is endowed with Mantan Moreland eyes that "begin to roll wildly" and shortly thereafter are scripted to "pop out." O'Neill could have kept the dialogue, which is rather matter-of-fact, but to have everything stereotypically niggerized—to go out of his margin to describe Lem as "a heavy-set ape-faced old savage of the extreme 25 African type, dressed only in a loincloth" --makes The Emperor Jones no more gratifying than had it been written by the Reverend Thomas

Dixon.

Despite the location of the play in the West Indies, O'Neill could not resist using a Congo Witch-Doctor and a Crocodile God imported from Africa. In this, and in his use of a tom-tom tempo which increases its pace as the play progresses, O'Neill could have been copying Vachel Lindsay's use of witch-doctors and tom-toms in

"The Congo" (1913). Lindsay's Afro-Americans start with "fat black 96

bucks in a wine-barrel room," wherein they get their religion and

vision, and range not much further than to wild dancers and crap shooters: "Wild crap-shooters with a whoop and call/Danced the juba or in their gambling hall." The Congo has exotic "cake-walk princes" and "tattoed cannibals," Africans whose object of worship is

"Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo."

In each of three sections, titled "Their Basic Savagery," "Their

Irrepressible High Spirits," and "The Hope of Their Religion,"

Lindsay takes his readers through a poeticizing of Afro-American life and into his vision of the Congo:

Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black, MORE Cutting through the forest with a golden track. DELIBERATE A negro fairyland swung into view, SOLEMNLY CHANTED A minstrel river Where dreams come true. LAY EMPHASIS The ebony palace soared on high ON THE Through the blossoming trees to the evening sky. DELICATE IDEAS The inlaid porches and casements shone With gold and ivory and elephant-bone. And the black crowd laughed till their sides were sore KEEP AS At the baboon butler in the agate door, LIGHT-FOOTED And the well-known tunes of the parrot band That trilled on the bushes of that land.2? AS POSSIBLE

Though it sound like a description of Disney World's Magic Kingdom,

"The Congo" is one serious artist's perception of Afro-Americans and black Africans, one which Lindsay had the poor judgment to subtitle as though it were a piece of sociological research: "A Study of the

Negro Race"! Both Lindsay's and O'Neill's portrayals of

Afro-Americans and black Africans are difficult to assess as cultural evidence because in both cases these serious authors have doctored their material to achieve what popularizers like Burroughs could do 97

almost effortlessly in works like the Tarzan series. All three of

them slandered Afro-Americans and Africans, but Burroughs had the

integrity to do it for money and not for art.

Like Burroughs, who wrote for fame, fortune, and fun, younger

scholars in particular might benefit by undertaking indexing projects

of the nature described here. Certainly, indexing popular literature

provides material for presentations at conferences (where the

outlines of this chapter were first made public), which might extend

one's fame slightly. Indexing projects confer academic

respectability on an area of American culture that was frequently

neglected until the seventies when popular culture began to attract

formal studies. Furthermore, indexes are currently highly saleable

commodities in the publishing world; a substantive indexing project

might allow the scholar to do the groundwork thoroughly on a popular

literature series and get paid a little something for doing it.

Needs and greeds determine what scholars do, too, and when they

find something that they want to work on they should find a way to do

so. The choice of material to index which is fun, revealing, and challenging, is wide open. And if fame, fortune, and fun fail to motivate in the direction of indexing popular culture materials, certainly there must still be one's personal fantasies of the equivalent of Opar and Tarzan and La.

For the importance and richness of popular culture material, as suggested by Burroughs' Tarzan series, has not been fully appreciated

in academe. \ Such an appreciation requires in part indexes which 98

make the material accessible to scholars in a more systematic form than the twenty-six books themselves, and in a more detailed form than critical interpretations of them. An index allows interested people to make use of one book-length index rather than the bookshelf-length series, a shortcut which might be enticing for those who otherwise would not look seriously at Tarzan and his relationship to American popular culture. With its pre-established parameters and a well-established canon, this proposal for an indexing project for the Tarzan series represents the groundwork for an investigation of the Tarzan image in all media. This larger investigation simply takes as its starting point the pulps which are Tarzan's home environment, the environment in which he was first presented to the world.

Tarzan books, as well as most pulp literature, have traditionally been the epitomy of conspicuous rejection by academicians. Whether or not they are sewage--that word was recently applied publicly to them by an academician--Tarzan books will be with us always if the American public, which dictates the creation and devouring patterns of popular culture, keeps its mind on such appealing companions as La and Opar. Chapter Three

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Science Fantasist and Science Fiction Writer

"To Lord Greystoke"

The dedication for Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, The Africa That Never Was (1970).

Reading an Edgar Rice Burroughs book is like taking an excursion through Walt Disney World. Both create fantastic worlds premised on existing technological knowledge and filled with exotic lures that are, ultimately, designed for commercial consumption. A comparison of their common elements will be taken up shortly in detail in an attempt to formulate some useable distinctions between the elements of fantasy and science fiction present in Burroughs'

Pellucidar series. Special emphasis is accorded the Pellucidar book which also belongs to the Tarzan series, Tarzan at the Earth's Core

(1929-1930 serial/1930 book), for it illustrates the racial attitudes held by Burroughs and many of his readers. After a brief survey of the lost race tradition in literature—from which

Burroughs emerged as the most popular American proponent via his

Pellucidar and Tarzan series-some rationales for the pedagogical separation of fantasy and science fiction will be suggested. These 100

two popular literary traditions are often confusedly considered as

one tradition, a misconception which, by way of some imaginary excursions to Pellucidar and then to Disney World, may be put to

rest.

Production of the seven Pellucidar romances, as with the Tarzan series discussed in the first chapter, spanned most of Burroughs'

1911-to-1944 writing career. His first Pellucidar book, At the

Earth’s Core (1922 book), was serialized in All-Story magazine in

1914--the year in which one of the most popular of all American romances, Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes (1912 serial), was first published in book form. While his first Pellucidar book appeared on the eve of World War One, the last in his lifetime, Land of Terror

(no serial) was published in 1944 as World War Two culminated.

Pellucidar (1915 serial/1923 book) and Tanar of Pellucidar (1929 serial/1929 book) also preceded the fourth Pellucidar book and thirteenth Tarzan book,1 Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, which is one of the finer examples of a Tarzan adventure written as a . As a writer of romances rather than novels, in the literary senses of these terms, Burroughs emphasized action to the detriment of character development. Another distinguishing quality of the romance as opposed to the novel is exhibited in his habits in regard to quickness of composition in lieu of considered story construction; Burroughs often composed his book-length romances in four to six weeks, according to Irwin Porges, his official 2 biographer. 101

Burroughs' Pellucidar series overlaps the latter years of the

scientific romance era, which is often dated from approximately 1870

to 1930. The Pellucidar series was well established by 1930, however, and only two of the last three works were written after that date: Back to the was written in 1935 (1937 serial/1937 book); Land of Terror was written in 1938-1939 (no serial/1944 book); and the last four Pellucidar adventures to be published in book form, three written in 1940 and the fourth in

1944, are stories published posthumously in Savage Pellucidar (1942 and 1963 serial/1963 book). Thus, the original idea was played off from January 1913 when he began writing this series to October 3 1944 when he the last Pellucidar story.

A consideration of one of the literary traditions out of which

Burroughs worked in designing the Pellucidar series is helpful. The or world-inside-the-world tradition becomes important when the question is called to the fore of how and why to distinguish between the elements of fantasy and of science in a

Burroughs book (or in the books of other popular authors from this era). Mainstream literary traditions which Burroughs touched upon in his works include imaginaire, voyage extraordinaire, utopian/dystopian, and Atlantean. Intermixing later with the lost race romances, these traditions all have examples of inner earth or inner world settings. One of the first lost race romances is "a story rescued from oblivion by Edward Everett Hale;" Hale's The -

Queen of California (1873) is "a re-telling of what is probably the 102

first lost race fantasy ever written," claim R. Reginald and Douglas 4 Menville. The original is Sergas de Esplandian (ca. 1510), "the fantastic tale of Amadis of Gaul and Queen Calafia, who gave her name to California." These traditions pre-date science,fiction, although Neil Eurich, among others, has written about the elements of science in some of them in Science and : A Mighty Design

(1967).

From the perspective of 1978, Burroughs precedes the arrival of modern science fiction. Strictly he is not pre-science fiction for certainly science fiction was coming into its own before Burroughs began writing in 1911; but in attitude he is pre-science fiction, for he is definitely a synthesizer of earlier traditions more than a sower of new directions in science fiction like H.G. Wells, who added the term "scientific" to "romance" to designate the new kind of fiction he was writing. Burroughs is a transitional figure in science fiction, though, in that he most successfully merged earlier literary traditions with contemporary tastes. Michael Paul Orth claims that "Burroughs popularized with the American public, and established the scientific romance as a full-blown genre in the pulps," and, further, that

the interest his stories generated led directly to the organization of the first in 1926, when Hugo Gernsback published , and science became a distinct popular genre in its own right.5

Samuel Moskowitz believes that Burroughs' contribution is even more significant than that, for he argues that the scientific romance was 103

qualitatively different before and after 1912, the date of publication for George Allan England's Darkness and Dawn and g Burroughs' Under the of Mars.

Of topical importance to Burroughs' Pellucidar idea is that in

April 1909 Robert Edwin Peary, Matthew Henson, his Afro-American assistant, and four Eskimos reached the North Pole;'7 in December

1911 the Norwegian Roald Amundsen conquered the South Pole, a month before the ill-fated party led by Robert Scott arrived at the world's southern extremity. These explorations, coming only a few years before Burroughs launched his writing career, are the culmination of the imperialistic impulses of a giant America just reaching its adulthood. Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed the frontier closed in 1893, and indeed it was--on continental America.

But five years later a little war with Spain resulted in America's acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines. This same impulse--or spirit--to conquer all frontiers in the world was reconsummated in Peary, Amundsen, and Scott reaching the earthly extremes of the North and South Poles.

Henceforth most American imperialism was confined to minor forays, like that of the Panama Canal which was completed in 1914, until the unprecedented, even for America, occupation and rulership which came with victory in World War Two. Until then, the imperialistic impulse was mainly confined to the imaginative creations of popular artists like Burroughs who led his readers vicariously to the frontiers of Mars/Barsoom, to /, to a 104

fantasyland he labelled Africa, and into the earth where there was another unexplored world to conquer which he called Pellucidar.

Besides representing another new frontier, Pellucidar is related to the pole-seeking explorers in that there was a popular belief—and a literary tradition to both reinforce and represent that popular belief—that at one or both of the poles there exists an opening which leads into the center of the earth. This indeed seems to have been one motivation for searching out the poles; if it was not a motivating force for the explorers themselves, certainly it was for those rooting for the explorers who had been exposed to the theory. Once the suggestion that such an opening or openings exists was popularized, it could not be ignored. It eventually had to be proven or disproven by trusted popular heroes who could confront and conquer the frozen frontiers to find the truth.

The idea of a hollow earth or a subterranean cavern far underground has its literary origins in classical mythology. A recent expression of this classical concept is in Avram Davidson's

The Island Under the Earth (1969). His Foreword citing sources from a Neo-Cappadocian text to Todros Podrosi, provides an inkling 8 of the mythical stature of the concept. Though not beneath the surface of the earth originally, Atlantis was supposedly an island-continent in a huge ocean. So far as is known, this is the original view recorded by a westerner, Plato, in the dialogues

Timaeus and Critias. And inner earth settings in literature extend back at least to Plato and his parabolic cave, which also finds 105

a descendant in Burroughs1 parabolic Pellucidar.

Traditionally, the hollow earth myth relates that somewhere a

river flows into the earth--not necessarily at the poles--wherein

there is a huge lake and an inhabitable island. This aspect of the

lost race mythology is recurrent in western literature, being

revitalized in Anglo literature by the publication of Thomas More's

Utopia, set on an island, in 1516. John Milton employs the inner

earth for other than salubrious ends in Paradise Lost (1667), but it

is the satirists during the Renaissance who add utopian satires and dystopian tales, the premier work of which is Jonathan Swift's

Gulliver ’sTravels (1726). The utopia/dystopia is usually situated on an island, in a rediscovered Atlantis, in a subterranean cavern, or at the earth's core.

At least four early eighteenth-century works, for instance, feature an inner earth world. An anonymous French work with an illustrative title was published in 1723: A Narrative of a Voyage from the Arctic Pole to the Antarctic Pole through the Center of the

World. The Dane Ludwig Hoi berg published a fantasy in 1741 titled A

Journey to the World Underground in which a science student falls to the center of the earth and becomes king of its inhabitants by employing his knowledge of science in the building of destructive weapons. An anonymous satire, titled A Voyage to the World in the

Center of the Earth, was published in London in 1755. It too includes a fall into the earth. This hero discovers a peaceful race of vegetarians before being flown back to the outer earth by a bird. 106

Yet another fall takes place in Englishman Robert Paltock's The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), but this time it is because

the hero's boat is sucked into the earth by a in the vicinity of the South Pole.

A more elaborate look at the storyline of The Life and

Adventures of Peter Wilkins may be instructive before taking up

Burroughs' use of similar formulaic conventions. Peter Wilkins is picked out of the sea by a passing ship and before expiring he tells this strange adventure to the narrator, Robert Paltock: After his school years, Peter took to the sea only to be quickly captured and set adrift by privateers. Eventually enslaved in Angola, he escaped to the Congo and instigated a prison break. Accompanied by/freed prisoners he absconded with a ship. Peter alone survived an ensuing shipwreck. He resided on the ship until the small boat in which he was exploring was drawn underground into the earth. There he found a beautiful lake and island. Before long his future wife,

Youwarkee, fell from the sky onto his house. He nursed her and they eventually married and raised a large brood. As prophet and leader of the flying people, much of Peter's power as a human divine came from his loud and smoky firearm which, to the astonishment of the winged people, killed nuisances like the Fish-Bear. In the present, after his wife dies, Peter wants to return to England so he creates a contraption which enables him to be carried out of the earth and across the ocean until the winged people drop him near the ship 9 Hector on which Robert Paltock, too, is returning to England. 107

In two of these eighteenth-century fantasy satires, and most

clearly in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, elements of

science and technology are introduced, particularly in relation to weaponry and flying. This tradition in utopian satires of dabbling

in science and technology continued to be strong right up to Edward

Buiwer-Lytton's book, : The Power of the Coming Race (1871), which features a futuristic race in an inner world with plenty of

"mechanical contrivances, including wings." In fact, Burroughs utilized these elements of The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins and Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, in (1923 serial/1926 book). Not only does Burroughs' moon contain an inner world called Va-nah, but the inhabitants of this world have learned to use mechanical wings and have had to bear the brunt of the earthling's destructive weapons.

The storyline of The Moon Maid is representative of Burroughs and it is similar to that of The Life and Adventures of Peter

Wilkins in many respects: In the twenty-first century, Julian 5th is in command of the ship Barsoom which is making Earth's first exploratory trip to Mars. Also on the ship is Orthis, a brilliant man who has made the scientific discoveries necessary to take a ship to Mars. Orthis is the villain, a jealous man whose ambitions have been thwarted when Julian was consistently promoted ahead of him ever since they were in Air School together. Finally, this jealousy surfaces when, after they are underway, Orthis sabotages the Barsoom so that it will be drawn into the Moon's gravitational field and 108

destroyed. Luckily, instead of crashing, the Barsoom is

unexplainedly borne into the vortex of a dead lunar volcano and

swirled into the center of the Moon, an inner world called Va-nah with an atmosphere similar to Earth's.

Julian unfortunately spares Orthis' life and together the two of them set out to explore Va-nah. They are quickly captured by the

Va-gas, a cannibalistic race of centaurs. Because of a severe electrical , a winged person is downed and the Va-gas capture her; she is the beautiful and intelligent Nah-ee-lah, the Moon Maid, daughter of the ruler of Laythe. While they are all three held captive by the Va-gas, Orthis ingratiates himself with his captors

in order both to attain power for himself and to obtain Nah-ee-lah; he promises the Va-gas an abundance of flesh and a variety of new weapons with which to defeat their enemies. Orthis attempts to forcibly seduce Nah-ee-lah but Julian happens to be nearby. Julian thrashes Orthis, but again ;spares his life.

After intrigues galore, Julian and Nah-ee-lah find themselves in a city of the Kalkars, mortal enemies of Nah-ee-lah's Laytheans.

They are again separated and Nah-ee-lah believes that Julian has betrayed her and the Laytheans. Eventually Julian and another prisoner from Laythe, Moh-goh, escape from the Kalkar city and make their way to Laythe. Nah-ee-lah has also somehow escaped and returned to Laythe, but she refuses to have anything to do with

Julian even though he is innocent of her suspicions concerning his conduct. He also has information about a revolt being planned 109

against her father's rule by Ko-tah, a Laythean prince who can gain

the throne only by marrying Nah-ee-lah or by killing the entire

royal family.

Meanwhile, Orthis has made himself indispensable to the

Kalkars, providing them with poisonous gas, mortars); hand grenades,

and scaling ladders. The climax comes when Ko-tah attempts to take

the throne through a revolt within Laythe while at the same time the

Kalkars, led by Orthis, attack from without Laythe. Ko-tah is

killed in a sword fight by Julian, eliminating one of the lustful

competitors for Nah-ee-lah, but Orthis, who also wants Nah-ee-lah,

succeeds in destroying Laythe. Julian regrets his not having killed

Orthis on the several occasions he had both the opportunity and

motive to do so. As the story nears an end, Julian and Nah-ee-lah

declare their mutual love for the first time (though they both loved one another from the first, apparently). The two of them escape the crumbling Laythe by donning the wings which Nah-ee-lah was first

seen using. They to an island where, in all chastity, they hide out for some time. One day they spot the Barsoom in the sky and, again attaching their wings, catch up with it just as it enters a volcano on its way out of Va-nah. Within a year Julian and

Nah-ee-lah marry and Julian 6th is born.

In America, the writer most responsible for popularizing the idea of the hollow core in a planet or moon used so extensively by

Burroughs is John Cleves Symmes who published two important books in the 1820s. The first of these is a utopian satire titled Symzonia: 110

A Voyage of Discovery (1820), which proposes the idea of a hollow

earth entered via a waterway at the South Pole, as in Robert

Paltock's The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751). Symmes

named Symzonia after no one in particular, of course. The second

book is a scientific or pseudo-scientific treatise by Symmes, in

conjunction with a James McBride, titled Symmes Theory of Concentric

Spheres (1826), which furthers the hollow earth idea in a

non-fiction form.

Symmes is discussed in L. Sprague de Camp and Willy Ley's Lands

Beyond (1952)and James Osler Bailey's Pilgrims Through Space and

Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction (1947).11 Bailey, in the earlier of the two works, asserts Symmes' authorship of these works while de Camp and Ley indicate several times that Symmes himself never wrote down any of his theories.

Bailey appears to be correct in reference to the fictional work, at least, for he credited Symmes in a reprint of it in 1965: John

Cleves Symms, Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820), by Captain

Adam Seaborn, Pseudonym of John Cleves Symmes. Perhaps the use of the archetypal pseudonym of Adam Seaborn misled de Camp and Ley, but more likely they simply were unfamiliar with these works at all since the connections between Seaborn and Symmes which Bailey makes are, at least on the surface, overwhelming. Probably de Camp and

Ley were also unfamiliar with Bailey's discussion of Symmes since, if they believed that Symmes did not write down his theories, they would have stated so in a manner designed to refute Bailey's Ill

evidence.

The importance of Symmes1 works in the tradition leading up to and including Burroughs cannot be stressed too strongly. For here

is the idea of a hollow earth—the fantasy which would become a potent myth for Americans—and this hollow earth myth is supported by a scientific explanation for its existence! No longer is the inner earth exclusively a consideration of fantasists. Now it can be considered, whether in jest or in seriousness, as a scientifically plausible concept. A variation of the theory, for instance, was put forth by Roscoe Eames, navigator on what started out as the world-round voyage of Jack London's Snark.

Walker, in The Seacoast of Bohemia (1973), straightforwardly notes that Eames believed in and intended "to navigate the oceans on Cyrus

R. Teed's theory that the surface of the earth is concave and that 13 we live on the inside of a hollow sphere." The efficacy of the theory went unproven, unfortunately, for Eames quit after the relatively simple chore of navigating the Snark to Hawaii.

A better known version of Symmes' book of fiction is Edgar

Allan Poe's adaptation of it titled The Narrative of A[rthur] Gordon

Pym in 1838. Using much of the imagery-starting with the name Pym which is curiously suggestive of Sym-mes—and similar settings, including the Antarctic and the whirlpool flowing into a South Pole opening, Poe retells Symmes' story up to the point where Pym is hurled into the watery chasm which, presumably, leads to Symzonia or 14 the inner earth. 112

In the latter years of the nineteenth century the satiric

elements in the utopian novel declined drastically while the lost

race romances proliterated. Thomas D. Clareson gives a succinct

definition of this new genre of lost race romances in his essay

titled "Lost Lands, Lost Races: A Pagan Princess of Their Very Own":

The basic formula of the "lost race" novel was easily identifiable: an explorer, scientist, or naval lieutenant, either by chance or intentional quest, found a lost colony or a lost homeland of some vanished or little-known civilization. In a sense, in the early years at least, the "lost race" novel was little more than a modification of the traditional utopia.I5

Following Symmes and Poe are writers like James DeMille who,

syphoning his title from Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833),

perhaps, published A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

in 1888. DeMille's story makes use of both scientific fact and

theory in an attempt to substantiate the existence of a lost race at the Antarctic.

For many other writers of scientific romances the Antarctic or

Arctic becomes simply an area which provides the means of entry into the earth. Early works in the tradition being discussed include the already cited South Pole entryway used by Robert Paltock in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), a South Pole "channel" in

Thomas Erskine's "" titled Armata: A Fragment

(1817), and the South Pole riverways in the works by Symmes and Poe.

The Antarctic, indeed, tends to be more popular than the Arctic in later works in this tradition as well.

Charles Billings Stilson's Polaris trilogy (1915-1917)— 113

i ncludi ng Polaris of the Snows, Minos of Sardanes, and Polaris and

the Goddess Glorian--locates an Atlantean kingdom in the Antarctic

populated by Greeks. Charles Romyn Dake's A Strange Discovery

(1899) adds the Romans to the Antarctic in one of many deliberate

attempts to complete Poe's Narrative of A[rthur] Gordon Pym, and

Dennis Wheatley throws in the Atlanteans in The Man Who Missed the

War (1945). Frank Savile's Beyond the Great South Wall (1901) puts

phenomenally lost Mayans not only at the Antarctic^ but back into the

Jurassic period. Women constitute the lost race in the Antarctic in

Frank Cowan's Revi-Lona: A Romance of Love in a Marvelous Land

(ca. 1890), and Edward T. Bouve, in Centuries Apart (1894), finds

room for both British and French lost races from the sixteenth century. George Randolph Chester locates a lost race of Greeks in

the Antarctic in The Jingo (1912), and Albert Bigelow Paine uses the

Antarctic as the setting for a lost race of primitives in The Great

White Way (1901).

More primitives, this time Cro-Magnons, are put at one or the other of the poles in Marshall's Dian of the Lost Land

(1935). There are lost races at the Arctic in William Wallace

Cook's Cast Away at the Pole (1904), Richard Hatfield's Geyserland:

9262 B.C.: Empiricism in Social Reform (1908), and Louis Pope

Gratacap's The New Northland (1915). Most popular of the lost races at the Arctic are perhaps the who are found in works like

Robert Ames Bennet's Thyra: A Romance of the Polar Pit (1901)—a work with some remarkable similiarities to Tarzan at the Earth’s .114

Core which include a polar entry into the earth via a balloon rather

than a dirigible and a conflict between the Vikings and ape-men—

George Allan England's Vikings of the Ice (1924), and Ian 's

Island at the lop of the World (1961). Viking Women in Alaska are

used in Abraham Merritt's Dwellers in the Mirage (1932), and

primitives in the Yukon are provided in Edison Marshall's Ogden’s

Strange Story (1934).

Burroughs uses the Arctic as the point of entrance into

Pellucidar in three of the seven Pellucidar books—Tarzan at the

Earth’s Core, Baek to the Stone Age, and Savage Pellucidar—and

Jules Verne uses a volcano in Iceland to get into the earth in A

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864). An inner world is

located in the Arctic for the lost race in William Richard

Bradshaw's The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892), and a cavern at the

Arctic provides a haven for moderns in The Land of the Changing Sun

(1894) by William Nathaniel Harben. Harben uses an electrical sun while a natural sun is posited within the earth at the Artie by

Willis George Emerson in The Smoky God (1908).16

The speculative science usually associated with science fiction—the What-if-the-sun-went-out? type theme—as in Gabriel de

Tarde's modern inner earth locale in Underground Man (1905)—becomes increasingly important in these lost race romances, as do topical issues like evolution and mechanization, issues which are fiercely debated by writers. Parleys over socialism were one popular subject for debates early in this century as illustrated by David M. Parry's 115

attack on socialism in Scarlet Empire (1906) and Richard Hatfield's

poorly written rebuttal in Geyser land: 9262 B.C.: Empiricism in

Social Reform (1908).

Science is not necessarily a positive force and, indeed,

popular writers of lost race works often equate science and

technology with the destructiveness of weaponry. Mark Twain's

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) does not begin with

that equation, but it certainly ends with it as Hank Morgan brings

down his medieval island empire through the use of gunpowder and

gruesome electrocutions. That civilization destroys itself through

its own inventions is an attitude also frequently expressed by

Burroughs in his Pellucidar series.

Abner Perry's navy--a navy being the most powerful and most popular means of waging strategic warfare at the time Burroughs was writing the early Pellucidar works--ultimately fends off the Korsars and unites the federation led by Emperor David Innes in At the

Earth's Core. Perry also re-invents gunpowder and cannons. The weapons introduced by Innes and Perry give them overwhelming power

in uniting Pellucidar into a federation. But when Innes temporarily leaves Pellucidar in the first sequel of the series, Pellucidar, the

Mahars—the dominant race of reptilian monsters—regain control through their -like soldiers, the Sagoths. Intentionally showing how terrible are the implements of war, Burroughs puts these weapons in a primitive setting for contrast. Again the navy of the lovable coward and inventor, Perry, rescues Innes and defeats the 116

fleet of the villainous traitor, Hooja the Sly One. Reflecting the

evolutionary battle in which human supremacy over reptilian

supremacy is at issue, the Sagoths are defeated and the surviving

Mahars fly north. This situation is the more interesting because of

the contrast between modern implements of warfare and the primitive

in which they are used: there is no more chance of the

opponents of Innes and Perry winning than there was of the Japanese

or Germans winning World War Two once Americans knew they could and would be the first to use atomic bombs.

Once victory is accomplished, again much like what America did

in Japan and in terms of aiding in their rebuilding, Innes1

dream is to create a great human civilization based upon such

progressive material concerns as ships and railroads and colleges.

This is a new frontier for the imperialist mindset which had been politically stupified by the stoppage of conquests before sliding

into isolationism in the twenties. After conquering the reptilian

Mahars, and uniting the feeble and primitive gilaks () under

the banner of Innes' charismatic leadership, inventor Perry sets out to reshape the inner world of Pellucidar far more drastically than

Thomas Edison reshaped America during the era in which Burroughs wrote.

In relation to the Pellucidar romances, an observation about

Orlando's Walt Disney World might be considered: a highly sophisticated science and technology was necessary to create, and is necessary to maintain, the Magic Kingdom, and it is the abundance of 117

fantasy in the Magic Kingdom which makes the science and technology not just palatable, but enjoyable.if this relationship-this wonderful balancing of technology and fantasy—exists in the Magic

Kingdom, a similar balance may be looked for between the literary renditions of science and fantasy in the Pellucidarian romances of

Edgar Rice Burroughs. Indeed, just as advanced technology in the form of an iron mole or dirigible is used to discover the lost races of the lost land of Pellucidar, and thus to mirror for the modern reader the outer earth's lost beginnings which are its pre-history, so do Disneyland and Walt Disney World recreate entire past eras through technology. Margaret J. King, an expert on the Disney amusement parks, makes this point more elaborately in her essay on

"Popular Culture in Cross-Cultural Perspective":

Not only are these "plastic" and "electronic" amusement centers important as the popular culture capitals of America, but for all their technological innovations and expertise, they are reviving many "traditional" and even "lost" features of American life which can be experienced in these specialized environments by their millions of visitors. Enclosing a number of separate "worlds," the parks actually recreate a series of vanishing aspects of traditional American life: the small town (with its Main Street); the pleasure drive; integrated "vernacular" architecture; handcrafts and decoration; pedestrianism, the town square, and the sense of personal interaction with other people and with the surroundings associated with festive community occasions.18

Just as the real world must be left behind upon entering the Magic

Kingdom, so the world of non-fiction must be abandoned upon poking into a Pellucidar book. The artist's efforts put forth in a work of popular science fantasy rarely result in the achievement of a palatable balance of elements. It takes a proficient popular 118

artist--a Disney or a Burroughs--to elevate both ends of the

artistic teeter-totter and keep them suspended in their precarious,

their artful, positions.

A recent news article in the Toledo [Ohio] contrasts the

visionary writing of many popular authors with the concept of

"negative science"--the science of the scientists "who 'prove' that

almost anything can't be done"--an attitude which, while it exists

today, was most widespread in scientific circles about the turn of

this century. Subjects mistreated at that time by the "negative"

scientists include heavier-than-air flying machines, "the computer,

the laser, and nuclear fusion." Those particular subjects have long

since been abandoned, but today advocates of negative science look

askance on the suspect areas of "telepathy, -psychokenesis,

out-of-body travel, even pyramid power." The article does not mention the implied and obvious corollary of "positive science"--the

science of the possible. The "negative science/positive science"

concept assumes, in harmony with many present-day conceptions about

science, that science, whether negative or positive, permeates the.

culture; it further assumes that science or scientific knowledge

filters most perceptions of the culture. So it is with an inner earth, too.

Even the most fantastic elements of the Magic Kingdom—whether

the Haunted House, 's Flight, or the Swiss Family 2D Robinson's Treehouse —can only be as fantastic as they are because of the elaborate science and technology behind their creation. They 119

have become both the machine and the garden, ironically, for without the technology of a far-advanced scientific culture patrons could not enjoy Disney World's Jungle Cruise which recreates through technology a primitive fantasy world replete with all the wild beasts and headhunters that a respectable jungle must have.

When approaching the Magic Kingdom in Disney World patrons know that they are about to experience many of the most highly contrived, technological innovations ever designed. Long lines only heighten the pleasures of expectation. Similarly, readers know when they prepare to open a Tarzan or Pellucidar book by Edgar Rice Burroughs that they should anticipate the experiencing of a highly contrived formula story. Long intervals--generally a year—between the appearance of the Tarzan books served to regularly whet the appetite of fans even though they knew that Tarzan, or a Tarzan-like hero such as Jason Gridley, would be pitted against essentially the same primitive environs in a lost world. The hero will demonstrate his

Anglo superiority in successful endeavors to rescue other deserving heroes or, more frequently, heroines. Often he is aided by sophisticated technology ranging from express rifles to scout monoplanes. Thus, just as it might be asked what in the Magic

Kingdom is fantasy ;and what is science fiction, there is a similar quandary associated with Burroughs' Tarzan and Pellucidar stories.

The fantasy tradition in utopian satires evolved in one direction into the lost race romances. As the sciences themselves flourished, their discoveries and expectations were used 120

increasingly to define the plots of these fantasies, both by imagining breakthroughs by overcoming impossibilities of present technology, and by lending plausibility through imaginative extensions of recent breakthroughs. Beginning a generation before

Burroughs wrote, these works were labelled "scientific romances," and later "science fiction," and in a wonderfully concise, if not precise, attempt to reflect both the elements of fantasy and of science, the term "science fantasy" is applied to them. Actually,

"science fantasy" seems to imply only a dose of science added to a fantasy, which is about all that Burroughs ever attempted. "Science fiction" may be the best term for hard core works in the field, but

"science fantasy" better suits soft core and incidental uses of science like Burroughs'.

The latter term, that of "science fantasy," best fits the scenes which follow after David Innes and Abner Perry—in the first

Pellucidar book, At the Earth’s Core—drill their way through the earth's crust to Pellucidar in Perry's "iron mole"; Innes and Perry certainly seem to be embarking on a classic science fiction voyage.

Midway through the Pellucidar series (and midway through the Tarzan series), Tarzan at the Earth's Core has Jason Gridley and Tarzan floating their thousand-foot-long dirigible into Pellucidar through the opening at the North Pole. As part of their excursion to rescue

Innes, Gridley and Tarzan also start their adventure in a manner which suggests a science fiction adventure. In neither book, as it happens, are the emphases on science fiction and intrusion of the 121

machine into the garden continued; instead, their plots turn to

adventure in a fantastic world.

Tarzan at the Earth's Core, for example, begins with David

Innes I, Emperor of Pellucidar, a captive in the dungeons of the

piratical Korsars. The book ends with the successful rescue of

Innes, but this frame contributes nothing to the interveneing

adventures of except the provocation for their

initially having made the trip to the wonderful world of Pellucidar.

The inspiration for the venture comes from the hero who shares the

limelight with Tarzan in their tale, Jason Gridley of Tarzana,

California.

Gridley's involvement in the Pellucidar series actually begins

in Tanar of Pelluoidar, for it is Gridley who lends his name to the

invention called the Gridley Wave. The Gridley Wave makes it

possible for that adventure to be transmitted to the outer world where the pen of Gridley's neighbor, Edgar Rice Burroughs, puts it

on paper. A similar device is employed in Pellucidar when Cogdon

Nestor, while hunting on the outskirts of the Sahara Desert, comes

across a telegraph-like apparatus ticking in the ground. Through

this conveyance—another example like the iron mole, the dirigible, or the Gridley Wave, of Burroughs' use of science translated into

technology to catapulfhis readers into fantasy lands—David Innes relates his latest tale from the inner earth. Now, in Tarzan at the

Earth's Core, Gridley has received another message from Abner Perry concerning the plight of Innes. His effort to effect a rescue leads 122

him from tame to the wilds of Africa where he

intends to enlist the aid of the greatest of all rescuers of mankind

and womankind, Tarzan of the Apes.

To Tarzan's everlasting credit he is skeptical of the idea that

a lost land with polar access exists within the earth. Jason

Gridley has this to say concerning Tarzan's questioning attitude

toward the theory of an inner earth:

"I am free to confess that I do not know what to believe," replied the American. "But after I received this message from Perry I commenced to investigate and I discovered that the theory of an inhabitable world at the center of the earth with openings leading into it at the north and south poles is no new one and that there is much evidence to support it. I found a very complete exposition of the theory in a book written about 1830 and in another work of more recent time. Therein I found what seemed to be a reasonable explanation of many well known phenomena that have not been satisfactorily explained by any hypothesis endorsed by science." (P. 14)

Among the items which the theory of an inner earth explains, which

science had not, is the warm air and ocean currents from the north and the northern lights. The latter, ingeniously, are caused by the

refractions from the inner earth's sun through the polar opening, according to the theory of the inner earth. Meeting another objection raised by Tarzan, and most skeptics of the theory, Gridley explains that the polar opening is so large and the turn inward so gradual that it cannot be spotted even from airplanes, much less by explorers like Roald Amundsen who are looking from the surface.

Like many works of this era, Fitzhugh Green's ZR wins (1924) made use of the popular notion that explorers might yet have overlooked the polar openings: 123

During the early , interest in the use of dirigibles for transport and exploration ran high, and they often figured prominently in lost race novels of that period. ZR Wins is such a story, beginning with an international dirigible race over the North Pole to establish the rights to a polar trade route. Millions of dollars are potentially at stake, but Lieutenant Bliss Eppley of the United States Navy has a grander dream: he believes that there is an unknown land near the pole warmed by volcanic activity that serves as the home of a lost colony of Norsemen; and he wants to use the U.S. dirigible, the ZR-5, to hunt for them and to claim this territory for America!

Amundsen continued to be an inspiration for such tales as he, along with Lincoln Ellsworth and Umberto Nobile, made the first flight over the North Pole, in May 1926, in a dirigible named Norse. Two years later Burroughs began writing his story employing a dirigible as the means of attaining the North Pole.

A much earlier source for the Pellucidar series as a whole may indeed be the "book written about 1830" which Burroughs has Gridley cite in supporting the theory of an inner earth to Tarzan. The reference may well be an oblique one to Symmes Theory of Coneentrie

Spheres (1826). Certainly John Cleves Symmes1 work is the most notable on the subject of a world within the world during the first half of the nineteenth century. Gridley's theory, which comes to him from David Innes, is direct descendent of Symmes' theory in terms of its geophysics: both postulate an inhabitable inner earth made up of concentric spheres, though their conceptions of these spheres vary, and both premise access to this inner world on openings at the poles.

Both Symmes and Burroughs make use of the argument that the 124

northern lights are the result of light emanating from within the

earth. The theory of an inner earth to explain the northern lights

is as colorful as the world of Burroughs' Pellucidar. With a stable

sun at its center, Pellucidar exists in the timelessness of

perpetual noon. Pel 1ucidar's surface area is the same as that of

the outer world's, but it is the inner rather than the outer surface

of the sphere defined by the earth's crust of some five hundred miles in thickness. A chief difference in geography between the

inner world and the outer world is that Pellucidar has a land area

in ratio of 3:1 to its oceans, whereas the outer earth has a ratio of 1:3 of land to water.

To test this theory, Gridley proposes to Tarzan that they construct a dirigible along the lines of a Zeppelin, as opposed to a balloon, the first of which had been successfully launched in 1900 by the German inventor Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Once Tarzan agrees to take command of the expedition, the two genetically superior friends experience a few extraordinary initial adventures in Africa as they acquire Harbenite, a lighter and tougher metal than any known at that time. Named for German inventors they recruit to help with their dirigible, Dr. von Harben and his son, Erich, Harbenite is the superior material with which they build their seventy-five ton, helium-gas dirigible. When completed, the 0-220, as they dub it, is 997 feet long and 150 feet in diameter; its top speed is 105 miles per hour. As with such earlier works as Robert Paltock's The

Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins and John Cleves Symmes' 125

Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery, the use of scientific knowledge centers on modes of transportation and weapons of destruction, concerns which are far more employable in fast-paced romances than in novels which dwell on the industry of butchering a whale or on investigating the social minutiae which adds up to tragedy for the

American individual.

Without outer earth's magnetic poles, a compass is useless in

Pellucidar. Even Tarzan is disoriented by the difficulties of determining direction. But the far greater problem for the intruders from the outer earth is the inability to mark with accuracy the passage of time. Again Tarzan, who is the least susceptible to this problem because of the usually unimportant nature of time in the African jungle, has some difficulty in reorienting himself to an existence in which distance is measured by the number of times one must eat and sleep before reaching the destination.

By uniting Tarzan and Pellucidar, Burroughs is finally able to procure a tiger, a saber-toothed tiger, for Tarzan,.to contend with. The encounter is diluted by its being only one of several threats which an ensnared Tarzan, caught in an animal trap set by

Sagoths, endures for the gratification of Burroughs' readership.

While hanging helplessly in the snare, Tarzan is first threatened by a huge thag (more commonly known, before it became extinct, as the

Bos Primigenus). As the thag attempts to dispatch the helpless

Tarzan, a saber-toothed tiger intervenes with a wanton but.fatal .126

attack on the thag before turning to the slightly more delectable

Tarzan. But, just as the saber-toothed tiger interceded with the thag, so the timely appearance of the Sagoths retrieves Tarzan from the heavily plotted snare into which he absent-mindedly stepped.

Burroughs the romancer is at his best in Tarzan at the Earth's

Core as he creates a well-ordered human hierarchy based upon the same evolutionary theory which supposedly deposed the pteradactile.

The most striking trio to ever wander together is made up of

Tar-gash the Sagoth, Thoar the gilak (human) from Zoram, and Tarzan of the Apes. Tar-gash and Tarzan become acquainted when Tar-gash trusts Tarzan while others in the capturing party of Sagoths, "men with the brains of men and the faces and skins of " (p. 46), do not. Tarzan in turn saves Tar-gash when the Sagoth king,

M'wa-lot, attempts to kill him for his suspiciously friendly attitude regarding Tarzan. After their escape together, the two buddies for a short while face life in Pellucidar alone and lost, or, in Tar-gash's case, outcast. As a device to create suspense or add excitement when the action lags, Burroughs frequently has

Tarzan, or Gridley, save someone; usually this develops into a convenience whereby the favor is returned in what might otherwise have been a too tight a spot for the hero involved. Eventually, then, Tarzan and Tar-gash team up with the gilak, Thoar of Zoram, whom they meet by saving him from a Dyal (a Phorarhacos of the

Miocene actually). Similarly, their separation is precipitated when 127

Tarzan is abducted by a thipdar (pteradactile), creatures so powerful that one of them brought down the scout plane piloted by

Gridley; this one, despite the arrows Tarzan deposits in its breast, grasps Tarzan in its talons and carries him to a nest high in the mountains twenty miles away.

The human commonality which the modern Tarzan exhibits in relation to Thoar and Tar-gash before he is kidnapped is impressive, for

though they represented three distinct periods in the ascent of man, each separated from the other by countless thousands of years, yet they had so much in common that the advance which man had made from Tar-gash to Tarzan seemed scarcely a fair recompense for the time and effort which Nature must have expended, (p. 72)

The threesome exist compatibly and even come to appreciate the attributes, mostly having to do with courage, of the others. Still, there are essential differences which go beyond the fact that

Tar-gash eats his meat raw while Thoar prefers it cooked; Tarzan, of course, is perfectly capable of adjusting to the mannerisms of either one of them.

A more significant indication of their differences is starkly apparent when each takes a turn at reacting to the wreckage of the scout monoplane in which Jason Gridley had set off to find Tarzan.

As they survey the downed aircraft only Tarzan, as might be surmised, understands and appreciates its potential as a mechanical invention; Thoar.neither understands nor appreciates it because of his ignorance, an ignorance which he is nonetheless anxious to 128

overcome through an inquisitive volley with Tarzan about the nature

of this new object; Tar-gash the Sagoth simply finds the idea of an

aeroplane incomprehensible for he can proceed no further in his

reasoning than to the fact that the wreckage before him is just

another vicious, growling form of life that did not survive a

battle. Wonderfully phrased, Burroughs describes Tar-gash and the

Sagoths as "pioneers upon the frontiers of humanity" (p. 46).

There are other varieties of human beings occupying the fictional stations at which Burroughs' heroes in Tarzan at the

Earth's Core stop, among them the Phelians who are tribal enemies of

the people of Zoram. Shruk, a Pheli chief, is the pursuer of Jana,

the; Red Flower of Zoram, for the Phelians pride themselves on their good taste in women by stealing theirs from Zoram. On Burroughs' scale of evolution, the Phelians are but a notch or two below Thoar and Jana, the only two Zoramian characters in the book.

Just stepping onto the scales are the siimy Hqribs, The most original members of this cast of Burroughsian characters, these reptilian flesh eaters are described variously as snake men and lizard men. The latter designation comes as much from their appearance as from the fact that they ride atop incredibly swift lizards called Gorobors. After slaughtering and consuming most of the Korsars who have captured Gridley and Thoar, the Horibs imprison

Gridley and Thoar and the three surviving Korsars in mud nests.

These mud nests are large air pockets near the shore line for which the only access are passages far beneath the surface of the lake. 129

There, the captives are to be fattened for feeding to the females and young among the Horibs. Tarzan is nearly consigned the same fate as Gridley and Thoar face, but, through his timely escape and coincidental meeting up with the warriors, he manages to rout the Horibs as well as save Jana and the other good folk from what would have been a Horibal dinner.

Throughout the book the stories of Tarzan and Gridley are told alternatedly; a heavy reliance on coincidence keeps their stories crossing. Originally, Tarzan and Thoar are paired and Gridley and

Jana are paired. Both pairs are separated with the inevitable .. result that Tarzan and Jana are paired up just as Gridley and Thoar are paired. And the Korsars, who have Innes in their dungeons, are the lost descendents of outer earth pirates whom all the characters must needs meet up with toward the end of this adventure.

Just as the lost land of Pellucidar has a taxonomy of distinct graduations for homo ereetus, so does the Tarzan-Gridley party bring with it at least three distinctive categories of human beings. The first type is in the majority. It includes the intelligent and adventuresome Anglos like Gridley, Captain Zuppner, and Tarzan, who lead the expedition. The second type includes the Waziri warriors who accompany Tarzan from out of the jungles of deepest Africa;

Muvira is the chief who leads the nine other Waziri warriors.

Generally fearless, but incapable of thinking for themselves, these

Africans, serving as the 0-220’s marines, retain an unorthodox posture. They are uncharacteristically expert in the use of the 130

rifle, thanks to Tarzan, while at the same time they retain their attitude that the rifle is a cowardly weapon to be scoffed at. It is true that among some African tribes there existed a form of warfare in which only equally-matched warriors might fight in single-handed combat. When a warrior killed his foe, he was given a higher ranking designated by the number of feathers in his headpiece, or notches on his sword or spear, or some other designation as obvious as the insignia/of the armed forces are to most Americans. A warrior who had killed two opponents must fight only an enemy who had killed two opponents, and so on whether the number of slain enemies was one or five or nine. Only equally matched pairs can show real bravery and this is the principle which the Waziri who fight for Tarzan hold in great esteem.

Because the Waziri are Tarzan's chosen, they are afforded a rather high place in the graduated pantheon of Burroughsian heroes, despite their being black Africans. In what might;in another story; appear to be an about-face, Burroughs has these Waziri learning about the and machinery of the 0-220-. "They are highly intelligent men," Tarzan indicates, and "quick to learn" (p. 19).

They are indeed fearless warriors, most of the time, and as such they occupy, unfortunately, a very small portion of the ink spread across the tales of Pellucidar, for many are the fearless about which Burroughs writes.

More typical of blacks portrayed by Burroughs are the few glimpses readers receive of the native porters who are singing, 131

swinging, and spooring along as part of Jason Gridley's party

searching for Tarzan in Africa. Like the only Afro-American aboard

the 0-220, Robert Jones--who represents the third type which the

Tarzan-Gridley party brings to Pellucidar--these natives have the

monopoly on laughter and jabbering. The introduction and subsequent

references to Jones, the expedition's black , are attempts at

humor. When the Waziri go in search of Tarzan, for example, Jones

comments to himself that "dem niggahs is sho nuf hot babies" (p. 35

of the Ace edition; this is a line, p. 34, which the Ballantine

editors censored from their edition).

Everyone except Jones quickly learns about the nature of time

in Pellucidar for when he awakens to find the sun at noonday--where

it always is in Pellucidar--he jumps from his bed, exclaiming:

"Lawd, niggah! You all suah done overslep' yo-sef" (p. 29 of the

Ace edition; the Ballantine edition, p. 29, expurgates the word

"niggah"). The African equivalent of Jones calling Tarzan "Massa

Ta'zan" (p. 30 of the Ace edition; the Ballantine edition, p. 30,

drops the word "Massa"), is Chief of the Waziri calling

Tarzan "The Big Bwana" (p. 34). While they cut the offensive words

Burroughs put in Jones' mouth, the latter designation by Chief

Muviro is deemed appropriate by the Ballantine editors. For the

Ballantine editors it apparently is necessary only to remove from

the history of Americans the racial servility of Afro-Americans and not Africans.

Equally incongruous in the approach to the Tarzan series 132

adopted by the Ballantine editors is the fact-that though they

expurgate words like "niggah" and "Massa," they do not scalpel, for

instance, "stupid ass" or "damned" (p. 56). In Tarzan of the Apes,

the most widely distributed of the Tarzan books, there can be found

in the Ballantine edition such apparently acceptable name-calling as Lord Greystoke (Tarzan's father) calling Captain Billings an

"ass" (p. 8), as well as such phrasing as "all hell broke loose upon

the jungle" (p. 59), "you damned shrimp" (p. 136), and "not by a damned sight" (p. 137). Nor have the Ballantine editors found offensive enough for expurgation the numerous corollaries to the words "niggah" and "Massa" which the image of Robert Jones . 23 conveys. Jones is straight out of the American coon tradition: servile, not very bright, "wide-eyed," superstitious, large-mouthed and mirthfilled. While everyone else takes seriously the first report of a pterodactyl,

Robert Jones covered his large mouth with a pink palm and with hunched and shaking shoulders turned and tip-toed from the room. Once in the galley with the door closed, he gave himself over to unrestrained mirth, (p. 32)

Throughout Tarzan at the Earth's Core Jones' gullibility is pawned by

Burroughs as a source of humor, even to the extent that upon all arrivals and departures of the 0-220 Jones is brought into the narrative to busily log in the time of arrival or departure in his diary as "noon."

In contrast to the remainder of the 0-220's crew, Jones is superstitious. When Tarzan and Tarzan's rescue party fail to return after three days, Jones' "simple, good-natured face wore a puzzled 133

expression not untinged with awe" as he studied the noonday sun.

But, set apart as an Afro-American with as irrational faith as

Twain's Nigger Jim, Jones "extracted a rabbit's foot from his trousers pocket. Gently he touched each eye with it and then rubbed it vigorously upon the top of his head at the same time muttering incoherently below his breath" (p. 57). Jones's rabbit foot is a special breed, particularly since there can be no equivalent found for rabbits in Pellucidar and, even if they could be found there,

"you cain't get 'em in de dahk of de moon where dey ain't no dahk an' dey ain't no moon, an' othe'wise dey lacks efficiency" (p. 59).

Jones is the coon inserted into the book apparently for no other reason than to provide a sort of comic relief at the expense of an entire race. While selected Africans like the Waziri can reach such stature as they do based upon at least a few positive qualities,

Afro-American characters like Jones are foredoomed to carry negative characteristics which correspond with those of the coon on the stage and in the motion pictures.

Though Burroughs is harsh and unfair in his treatment of the

Afro-American race, his creation of lost races is superb. The reader is constantly reminded that what the imagination of Burroughs presents are things not "vouchsafed to the eyes of man" for millions of years, maybe never. Burroughs constantly compares life in

Pellucidar with what it may have been in an earlier stage of evolution on the outer crust; Symmes, on the other hand, uses a similar situation in his utopian novel to comment on what life on 134

outer crust missed becoming, rather than what it did become.

Burroughs' romances were composed after the explorers Amundsen,

Scott, and Peary established that the poles contain no openings

which lead into a hollow earth. That long-popular myth,

traditionally viewed on the side of negative science, remains to

this day in the realm of fantasy, though the recent scholarship of

Dr. Raymond Bernard, published in his The Hollow Earth (1964),

provides new geographical knowledge and scientifically-verifiable

evidence that establishes conclusively that there are "land areas 24 within the polar concavities beyond the North and South Poles."

Not that negative science and fantasy are to be equated. Negative

science in popular literature is more like extrapolation. When the

extrapolation is proven to be fact, it is therefore scientific; when

proven to be impossible--as in the case of the openings at the

poles if Dr. Bernard is ignored--it is therefore fantastic. The

strength of the negative science argument, of course, is that every

time a scientist says it cannot be done, and later scientists prove

the earlier scientists wrong, it is an I-could-have-told-you-so situation for the fantasist who said it could and is the fantasist's ticket to ask belief of an audience for other possibly completely preposterous imagined accomplishments. It is perhaps

ironic, but this is one of the ways in which science can reinforce a fantasy tradition. Another way is via Disney World.

Science fiction can be contrasted with fantasy on the basis of its concern primarily with science and technology while fantasy 135

tends toward the supernatural, the magical, and the accidental.

Science fiction is usually concerned with matters of the head while fantasy leans toward matters combining the head and heart. The difference is like that between Magic Mountain and Space Mountain

(the super-rides at Disneyland and Disney World, respectively).

Both are fantastic, thrilling, all-consuming entertainments. Their auras are dissimilar, though, for the cathedral of Magic Mountain exudes enchantments along a whimsical waterway while the cathedral of Space Mountain winds its course through a cold and calculated universe. Both are technologically supreme examples of Disney's multi-mediated science fantasies.

Despite the distinctions that can be pressed between fantasy and science fiction, they cannot, ultimately, be separated. Perhaps this is a dilemma, but if so only in the sense that good/evil or yin/yang are not meaningful outside of their relationship to one another. Readers of the Pellucidar series—or any of the hundreds of lost race romances of the generation before and the generation after the turn of the century—separate the fantasy in them from science fiction only at the risk of upsetting that which makes these adventure stories, with their artful balancing of fantasy and science fiction, so successful as popular art. The separation can take place pedagogically, but their value is greater if readers suspend their critical facilities.

Now, if patrons are happy with just knowing that they are in the Magic Kingdom—if readers are happy with just knowing that they 136

are with Gridley or Tarzan on their treks through Pellucidar—then

bless them one and all because they are reaping the ultimate reward

for their efforts: unadulterated entertainment. But, alas,

scholars and inquisitive students of popular culture distinguish

between fantasy and science fiction to the extent that they know when they are in Tomorrow!and and when they are in Fantasyland.

They are able to assess what ultimately are superficial distinctions

so that Burroughs can be placed in perspective of./the larger genres of both fantasy and of science which he incorporated into his adventure, stories, just as Disney incorporated these same elements of adventure, fantasy, and science fiction in creating the Magic

Kingdom.

The concept of "generic conversation," phrased by Michael

Marsden, Professor of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State 25 University, is applicable here. Instead of speaking of genres like fantasy and science fiction in terms of generic conversions, if you will, wherein one genre fades into another, or of generic overlapping in which, perhaps, the science fiction of Perry's iron mole laps into the fantasy of the Pellucidarian jungle, or of

Frontierland overlapping into down at the , Marsden's phrase suggests that it is possible to look and listen for generic conversations. Literary boundaries, useful as they are for making distinctions between, say, detectives and westerns, can never actually prevent them from working off one another, though the existence of the boundaries tends to segregate 137

various influences. There is communication and continuity in the

generic conversation that is going on between Tomorrowland and

Frontierland, and between Frontierland and Fantasyland, and so on.

To the extent that it is interaction and not an attempt to prove

that one genre dominates, the generic conversation can heighten and enlighten the various works involved. In addition, Marsden's idea of generic conversations seems to provide yet another rationale for the use of the term "science fantasy" since "science fantasy" does not suggest a break with the genre of fantasy as do the terms

"science fiction" or "scientific romance."

Burroughs and Disney are both masters at providing several hours of release from the here and now through animated landscapes.

Both engage science as the servitor of the fantasies they create— both make use of the machine as the enabling agent for creating fantasy—and both appeal to the same human needs for drama, action, and excitement. Without carrying the analogy to an extreme, it is possible to compare the outstanding elements of Tarzan at the

Earth's Core with the outstanding elements of Disney World. Both provide a world within the world through the and passageways of amusement rides or by a venture to the earth's core. And both offer an alternative to the present by stocking these fantasy lands, lost lands, which are intended primarily for entertainment, with such devices as primitives, pirates, "fantastic machines," and

Adamic American heroes. .

Disney, like Burroughs, employs the appeal of the utopian novel 138

along with the promise of excitement, exhilaration, and experience

that is worthwhile because it is extraordinary. Furthermore, to

borrow again from Marsden, "the good popular artist is a good

synthesizer." As Walt Disney synthesized in one location what is

perhaps the world's most varied collection of popular culture­

becoming in the doing one of the world's most popular artists—so

Edgar Rice Burroughs in synthesizing elements of science fantasy and

science fiction into his formula adventures remains one of the world's most popular authors. Chapter Four

The "White Ape Myth" and Tarzan

The Bowling Green News (14 May 1976), p. 2.

Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois were the two prominent

Afro-American leaders and authors when Edgar Rice Burroughs penned his first Tarzan story. Both were mulattoes, a distinction which aided in their rise to prominence, but which also gave them a keener 140

sense of being an outsider not only in relation to Anglo-American

culture but to Afro-American culture. The year Tarzan appeared in

the pulps, James Weldon Johnson pursued the themes of the

Afro-American identity crisis and of passing—of disavowing one's

blackness in favor of being taken for an Anglo-American because of

being a light-skinned mulatto--in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912).! The on-going Afro-American crisis in establishing an

identity and of exploring the accompanying outsider sensibility was

startlingly contrasted with the unthoughtful portrayal of

Afro-Americans in numerous early films. Because of their white skins

some minorities, like those from southern Europe, assimilated after

being ill-featured in early films. But Afro-Americans continued to

be outsiders. With their exclusion of Afro-Americans and Africans

from those who make up humanity, the Tarzan films fit comfortably

into the milieu's prevailing attitudes.

In the years between 1912 and 1915, Afro-American images

reflected in films portraying the African jungle include "ignorant,

often vicious savages or servile black gun bearers and 'Number One

Boys,'" according to the extensive study of the era's films included 2 in Daniel J. Leab's From Sambo to Superspade (1975). Little

information is available on the content of the 1913 film, The Terrors of the Jungle, but a still photograph from the film, reproduced in

Leab's book, carries a caption which accurately describes the scene: 3 "While the black servant cowers, the white hero glowers." The valiant white versus the worthless black is present also in The 141

Loyalty of Jumbo (1914), a film short in which "a number of hostile

African natives are held off by a hardfighting white mother while her 4 little daughter's pet elephant goes for help." Already the elephant

is being usurped and tamed by the white intruders. And this is four

years before the first Tarzan film, Tarzan of the Apes (1918)!

The development of early feature films coincides with the

appearance in American culture of Tarzan of the Apes. This chapter

suggests some of the connections between a film and its milieu by

looking at early jungle films generally and the film version of

Tarzan of the Apes specifically. The paucity ,of critical or

scholarly treatment of the Tarzan films is detailed and an analysis

of the process by which films stereotype images is included along with theoretical probings as to the nature of silent films.

Although feature films were being made by 1913, the landmark

feature film which historically ends the era of short silent films is

D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). The black images and stereotypes in previous films are only a prelude for the cinematic arts as well as for cinematic propaganda. The era between the making of Birth of a Nation and the release of Tarzan of the Apes is a crucial one as well to the development of cinema and a cinema audience. Leon Reisman, in his essay on "Cinema Technique and Mass

Culture," notes very generally that the following changes occurred during this era:

During the war years of 1914 and 1918 these techniques [which led to monopoly in the film industry] were rationally applied: (1) The product was increased in size; companies 142

produced feature films rather than short pictures. (2) The product was standardized; formula pictures became the rule. (3) The manufacturing process was made more efficient; this introduced a high degree of technical specialization, from carpenters to star . (4) A wider market was sought; the industry turned from a low-class urban audience to a more prosperous middle-class urban audience which could pay higher admission prices. (5) Advertising became intensive; publicity campaigns describing the story and the stars accompanied the release of each picture.3

Birth of a Nation was at the forefront of these developments, though

the changes in the film industry Reisman focuses on were not confined

to the 1914 to 1918 era. The full range of already popular

stereotypes for Afro-Americans are included in Birth of a Nation,’ in

several instances, D.W. Griffith also invented variants on the established stereotypes or carried them to an extreme which would not

be duplicated by other producers.

Birth of a Nation has the faithful souls of the mammies and

Toms; the pickaninnies and coons dancing, clowning, and smiling their contentment; and the bucks and mulattoes, sometimes in the same character like Silas Lynch. The renegade Gus, as well as Lynch, are raging, sexually repressed villains who lust after white flesh and who sometimes substitute physical violence for sex. On a scale never before hinted at, Griffith's Birth of a Nation tied into a Gordian knot for the masses of American movie-goers the issues of sex and racism. The blending of the sexes and the races occurred not only in the bucks Gus and Lynch, but in the Mulatto Lydia who is also emotionally unbalanced because she is oversexed. Like many of the

Afro-American and African film characters based on Edgar Rice

Burroughs' works, Gus, Lynch, and Lydia are presented as being mad or 143

as deviant personalities. Among those who do battle with these

Afro-American deviants is a blacksmith who, symbolically, tosses blacks out of an All-American log cabin in Birth of a Nation.^

A reviewer wrote in 1913 that "our darker brethren never complain" about their image in film. There were complaints, of course, but oftentimes they never penetrated the veil dividing the

Anglo-Americans from the Afro-Americans; and chances are that the reviewer was not really listening. The release of Birth of a Nation in 1915 was met with organized resistance by Afro-Americans and

Anglo-Americans who protested against its images. One of the most ambitious Afro-American complaints to their image in films came five years later, appearing the same year as Tarzan of the Apes (1918).

For three years, during which time he was also a special assistant to the Secretary of War, Emmett J. Scott worked to produce Birth of a

Race (1918), a lengthy rebuttal to Griffith's Birth of a Nation. In seeking to counteract the impact of Griffith's film, Scott's Birth of a Race Photoplay Corporation initially had the moral support, if not the financial backing, of most civil rights groups. Due to scandal-ridden financing, the film was never finished. Because of these problems, as well as changes made to satisfy the benevolent interests of the Anglo-American investors, the film failed to attract much popular or critical attention when it was released in unfinished form.

Scott's failure was a convincing argument that propagandistic rebuttals to propaganda were not yet feasible, especially from an 144

Afro-American producer. The Herculean effort by Scott was important,

however, for it furthered the development of Afro-American

independent filmmakers. Although his personal effort was thwarted,

Scott's leadership encouraged the Lincoln Motion Picture Company to

produce films which dealt with Afro-American pride and dignity.

Without the excesses of Birth of a Nation, it might be argued, these

developments would not have taken place as rapidly as they did.

Through exclusion, as was the case with Scott's Birth of a Race,

as well as through negative stereotypical portrayals in the

Anglo-American productions, film as a medium failed to help the

country deal with its problem in relation to ethnic groups. If they

were not feasible agents of change, these films were certainly

carriers of culture. Three concepts—expectation, timeliness, and

myth—may together help reveal the cultural milieu from which a film

such as Tarzan of the Apes (1918) emerges. A film which plumbs

slightly beyond the depths of expectation, a film whose appearance is

so timely and message so immediate that it creates a metaphor or a

symbol for an era (Birth of a Nation, Tarzan, Jazz Singer, Scarface,

Scarlet O'Hara, Mr. Smith, Easy Rider, Jaws, and so on), is

exhibiting several of the critical criteria for a popular film. A

film like Tarzan of the Apes draws upon symbols and myths which, when analyzed, reveal insights into the culture. In Sixguns and Society:

A Structural Study of the Western (1975), Will Wright suggests that

"a myth is a communication from a society to its members: the social concepts and attitudes determined by the history and institutions of 145

a society are communicated to its members through its myths.By

isolating particular myths and their symbolic parts, it may be

possible to reveal, in turn, some reasons as to why a film was

popular.

Tarzan has become a popular cultural icon in America, a popular

symbol of the myth of white superiority, of the leader of a lost land

and a Golden Age approximating Eden, and of the myth of the white

ape. Though born on the primitive coast of Africa, Tarzan is the

aristocratic son of Lord and Lady Greystoke of England. As a

stepchild of a tribe of apes, Tarzan has those affinities for the

most primitive of man's relatives which most Americans acknowledge

only to the extent of seeing how human-like are the caged simians in

their local zoo. As a white man, Tarzan is superior not only to the

apes, but to the blacks who, on the nineteenth-century's ladder of

evolution, oftentimes are placed on the same rung with the apes.

Thus, as a mythical white ape, Tarzan draws the substance of his hero

status from being at once the product of both the most primitive and

most advanced forms of humanity.

The appeal to the twentieth century is so great that after the

initial hardcover version of Tarzan of the Apes (1912 serial/1914

book), and with the exception of only three barren years, Tarzan

books entered the market at the rate of one per year until 1939.

Tarzan of the Apes, The Return of Tarzan (1913 serial/1915 book), The

Beasts of Tarzan ;(T914 serial/1916 book), and The Son of Tarzan (1915

serial/1917 book) were all in print before the first Tarzan film was 146

released in the same year as the publication in hardcover of Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916 serial/1918 book). Investigations into

the origins of Tarzan as a supremacist symbol, however, may most fruitfully rely upon two primary sources: Tarzan of the Apes as book o and, in this chapter particularly, Tarzan of the Apes as film. Both are accessible cultural artifacts, a prerequisite for a study in which an interpretation of American culture is handled on the basis of cultural artifacts. The relationship between a film and its milieu--as revealed here through a consideration of expectations, timeliness, and myth—is the subject, then, for excursion into a limited facet of the theory of popular film.

In the briefest possible overview, some generalizations concerning cultural trends should be mentioned. When the overt, institutionalized expression of white master over black slave was destroyed, it was replaced by a covert, socialized expression of white over black which solidified into Jim Crowism in the twentieth century. From the impact of the great waves of immigration between the Civil War and the Great Depression there developed, in addition, a subtler shade consciousness in which the brown-skinned Asians and the olive-skinned Southern Europeans were also discriminated against by the dominant Anglo culture in America. The attitudes accompanying these biases were present also in the cultural hegemony which culminated in America's bullying of Spain to acquire more brown-skinned colonials on islands ranging from Cuba to the

Philippines. This imperialistic period was followed by Theodore 147

"Bully" Roosevelt's stance of "walking tall" to protect our interests

and, under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, a world-wide war in

which Americans made a massive excursion into Europe. Connecting

into this cultural flow of a supremacist white American culture is,

as a representative artifact, the film Tarzan of the Apes.

Thus, the importance of the timeliness aspect of a popular film.

Initial questions to be asked about a popular film include, "How does a scholar date this filmic material?," and "What mannerisms, cliches,

fads, conventions, and attitudes are in this film (or in films of

this era) which are not normally found in other films from other eras?" The date being sought is not so specific as the date of the copyright or the year of the film's greatest box office receipts.

Rather, it is a date achieved by a process through which a film may, point by point, be identified with a particular milieu and no other.

It is a process through which concepts, fads, and emotions of an era may be pinpointed as evidence. It is also a process through which intellectual traditions may be tapped and the progress of ideas investigated. The cultural attitudes toward blacks would be expressed in different terms during World War Two, to take an obvious example, than they were in 1918 when America was intruding for the first time in the European struggle. Because America needed

Afro-Americans as allies in World War Two, Hollywood responded with solicitous films like Lifeboat (1943) which presented the anomaly of an Afro-American as All-American; in 1918 a film like Birth of a Raoe could not garner an audience while Tarzan of the Apes became one of 148

the first truly popular films, being among the half-dozen films to g first go over the million dollar mark in box office receipts.

Additional insight into the timeliness of Tarzan of the Apes

might be gained by looking at the conceptions held by reviewers of

the era concerning film as reality. A reviewer for the New York

Times, for instance, wrote of "the stirring scenes of the jungle" in

Tarzan of the Apes-, "a majority of these," he continued, "were

photographed in Brazil, and several hundred natives appear before the camera."10 some footage used in the film was obtained in Brazil, but

the bulk of it was shot in Louisiana and in ' Griffith

Park. By today's standards, there is little reality or sublety or sophistication in a film such as Tarzan of the Apes. In 1918, however, it was judged to have been as stirring as, perhaps, Jaws

(1975) was to mid-seventies viewers.

Detailed analysis could also be applied to such faddish items as the beauty traits of Jane Porter (Enid Markey) or to the physique of the first Tarzan () who had a barrel-chest and the heavyset build of a professional wrestler.Through a process of isolating a series of such factors, a popular film viewed as a cultural artifact may be tied to technological advances, and it may be tied to changing fads and valued beauty traits which also reflect the film's milieu. The film itself becomes, prima facie,. a piece of evidence from which may be extracted inferences for information about the era.

Popular and expected elements from the nineteenth-century 149

literary traditions play a role, too. In Tarzan of the Apes as a

film, these include the elements of an orphan, a treasure, a mutiny,

castaways, a case of mistaken identity, and, among similar items, a

lost and found heir. The qualities which are most valued in the

transference from book to film, however, and the qualities most often

found successfully transferred, are those dealing with myth. The

precise transposition of elements like the treasure from book to film

has rarely been of great importance in the making of a film based on

a book.

The essence of a filmic story, though not necessarily of a

literary story, is in its mythical qualities and not in its details

or characters. It is the mythical experience which an audience anticipates rather than an exact copy of a storyline; a primitive

Tarzan is exciting, for example, but a primitive Tarzan who also

understands and appreciates the attributes of American culture is exquisite, and it matters little whether the bearer of western civilization is the gentlemanly officer D'Arnot in the Tarzan books or his counterpart the bedraggled Binns who spends his filmic life fleeing from the Arab slavetraders in the first Tarzan film.

Audience expectations are oftentimes formed and heightened when the film is based on an already well-known piece of literature.

Tarzan of the Apes' overwhelmingly popular success as a film was in large measure based upon expectations sown by the book; it helped as well to have a press agent like Harry Reichenbach who could pull off an effective publicity stunt like attempting to register an ape at a 150

major New York hotel at the same time that the film was opening in

New York. Or who could straightforwardly state in his promotions of

Tarzan of the Apes that the film cost what would have been a colossal sum for the era: $300,000!

William Parsons of Chicago produced both Tarzan of the Apes and its sequel, The Romance of Tarzan (1918) from the book version of

Tarzan of the Apes. The sequel is comic and not Tarzan-like; it was produced without Burroughs* knowledge because Parsons scripted it from the last chapters of Tarzan of the Apes, for which he had purchased the film rights. Because it deviated so far from the expectations created by the original, it was not successful at the box office. The lessons to be learned about mass appeal in filmmaking were being put into practice quickly. Popular films were promptly geared to the largest possible audience to ensure their success. They lost little time in experimenting with how best to incorporate and exploit the likes and dislikes of a large segment of the public at any particular moment in time. By implementing these practices, films like Tarzan of the Apes established another criterion which a film, if it is to be popular, cannot neglect.

Evolution, a topical subject for the era, is established immediately as a theme in Tarzan of the Apes for the first filmic image is of an ape in early morning; the second image is of Tarzan as a youth awakening, stretching full length (whereas the ape is crouched), and beating his chest; the third image is of a mature, wide-awake Tarzan sitting in a tree. These three stages foreshadow 151

the plot development in this sixty-minute original version of Tarzan of the Apes directed by Scott Sidney.

Mutiny on board the Fuwalda requires Binns (George French) to save Lord and Lady Greystoke (True Boardman and Kathleen Kirkham) from being murdered’by abandoning them on the west coast of

Africa. Nonetheless,, Binns promises to return for the couple. After

Tarzan is born, Lady Greystoke dies and apes from the Tribe of

Kerchak kill Lord Greystoke. Exchanging her dead baby for Tarzan,

Kala the ape adopts and raises him.

The youthful Tarzan () discovers the cabin and delights in the knife and books which are his rightful inheritance from his aristocratic family. One day he finds an exhausted Binns there. Binns had returned after having been enslaved for many years by Arab slave traders. The first white man Tarzan has ever seen,

Binns teaches Tarzan to read and write before setting off again for

England with the promise of sending a rescue party for Tarzan.

Many years pass. Tarzan becomes a mighty killer who conquers gorillas and lions with his knife and tortuously strangles to death the black chieftain who murdered Kala; unfortunately, his victory yell is not quite as effective as it would be when the sound era

Tarzans did it. Binns1 trek to England has apparently been a successful one for the Porter Party--Professor Porter (Thomas

Jefferson), Jane Porter (Enid Markey), Clayton (Colin Kenny), the rival for Jane's hand and Tarzan's title, and Esmeralda (Bessie

Toner)--arrives at the same spot where the original mutiny took 152

place. By this time it is Tarzan the man (Elmo Lincoln) who is there

to watch them bungle through the jungle.

At first Tarzan is disturbed at the intrusion so he posts a sign

on his cabin: "This is the house of Tarzan, Killer of Beasts. Touch

not the things that are [sic]. Tarzan watches." But he

quickly turns to the role of an invisible saint to the Porter Party.

He indeed watches over them, rescuing them when necessary, and, in

the meantime, falls in love with Jane. By film's end Tarzan has

risen from his origins in ape society to a point where he and the

civilized white woman, Jane, are happily coupled.

As well as elements of adventure, Tarzan of the Apes includes

biased and sometimes subtle (i.e., included without conscious

intent), intellectual assumptions concerning issues important to the

era: the bias in favor of inherited attributes over

environmentally-acquired attributes, for the English Lord, Tarzan,

unlike any of the apes or blacks, becomes Lord of the Jungle; the

assumption that change equals progress, that Anglos strive to conquer

nature while Africans strive for harmony with nature, for only Anglo

intruders have the trappings of machines and civilizations far

removed from nature while their less progressive cousins in Africa

have not even gunpowder or literature and they have yet to extract

themselves from the heart of nature; the adamant and marked attitude

that people with black skin are inferior to people with white skin,

for Tarzan is king of all beasts, including blacks; the idea that

Anglo civilization is superior to the civilization (or, rather, the 153

lack thereof) of Africans, though Tarzan himself rejects both extremes in favor of an ideal freedom that puts his knowledge of western civilization to work in his dictatorial subjugation and preservation of the Dark Continent; and the assumption that western culture is logical, rational and orderly like the tall buildings in

Manhattan, while African culture is illogical, emotional superstitious, and disorderly like the jungle. These ideas and assumptions, attitudes and myths, are only skeletons of those present in the film Tarzan of the Apes. What is interpreted from them by the scholar may, tentatively, be considered as a refraction of attitudes present in American culture and as a refraction of representative traits in American culture in the years just before and just after 1918.

Ideas and emotions prevalent in the culture will show up in the film whether they are placed there consciously or unconsciously. By isolating them—for instance, the idea that western civilization is superior to the civilization of black Africa—they may be identified in the form in which they were prevalent in the era under consideration. The superiority of western civilization idea is present today—and was present long before 1918—but the important point is that it had a particular hue and cast which identify it with the particular era. The ideas themselves may be present in American culture during various eras, but they are arranged and valued differently to reflect the character of each milieu.

The fact that the white supremacist myth was present long before 154

does not distract from Tarzan of the Apes' pertinence to its cultural milieu. Indeed, the ideas fostering this myth were so prevalent in the era that it would be difficult to find more than a few films, by

Anglo-Americans or Afro-Americans, in which some stereotypical representation of the inferior black was not present. Birth of a

Race, Afro-American Emmett J. Scott's 1918 rebuttal film to D.W.

Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation is one. Far more typical are the images in the independent Colored and Indian Film Company's Uncle

Remus’ First Visit to New York in 1917. These stereo-mythical images are in the films of Afro-American filmmakers as well, obviously, suggesting that they form an integral part of the cultural baggage for the era.

All such connections between a film and its milieu cannot be explored here. The White Ape Myth—the white supremacist myth as symbolized by the character Tarzan--therefore, will be used shortly as a representative example of how this investigatory process of establishing ties between a film and a milieu may be revealing. The attitude toward Afro-Americans in America has been, on the whole, negative. This bias appears in their portrayal in Tarzan of the Apes.

The mythification which resulted from the cultural biases may or may not have had viable correspondences in reality; that is a separate issue. In lieu of reality, the films of the era presented a celluloid vision of reality aimed primarily at Anglo-Americans.

Even when an attempt at historical documentation was made it was usually shallow and misleading as in Birth of a Nation. Woodrow 155

Wilson's history books were cited in this film, but most of the remaining documentation came from the pen of the demented Reverend

Thomas Dixon who wrote the hatefilled The Clansman (1905). Dixon equated the Afro-American with the devil and whatever other derogatory possibilities presented themselves. Through Dr. Cameron in The Clansman, for instance, he voices the vile rhetoric which permeates the book:

For a Russian to rule a Pole, a Turk to rule a Greek, or an Austrian to dominate an Italian is hard enough, but for a thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his animal odour, to shout in derision over the hearths and homes of white men and women is an atrocity too monstrous for belief.13

A variation on the Ku Klux Kian to the rescue of the white race, a la

Dixon and Griffith, was the lone white man like Tarzan to the rescue.

This theme was most pronounced in the African jungle beginning with

Big Game Hunting in Africa (1909). This too was a documentary, filmed in Selig's Chicago studio, of Teddy Roosevelt's safari in 1909 to Mombasa, Africa. Many viewers believed that this film contained actual footage from Africa because it used live animals and perhaps because real Chicago natives did act as savage Africans apparently should act in front of an Anglo's camera.

A review of Big Game Hunting in Africa in Collier's noted that when going into the bush after the lion, "the beaters became scared, but the ex-president was calm." The juxtaposition of the lowliest black African and the highest—in the eyes of many Anglo-Americans— achiever of the white race, was illustrated further in the Collier's 156

narrative:

The big native tracker, always on the job, burst through the underbrush and found the slain monarch [the lion] breathing his last. Again he raised his war-cry and wrapped his arms around his naked body, snake fashion. The other natives hurried up with Mr. Roosevelt and his son in the lead.14

Tarzan could certainly do no better than to take his cue from an

ex-president!

Certainly, Elmo Lincoln gathered his cultural clues from some similar sources. Afro-American Jack Johnson took the Heavyweight

Boxing Championship away from an Anglo-American by soundly beating

Jim Jeffries in 1910. It was the era's equivalent of Jesse Owens' upset of Hitler's Berlin Olympic Games in the thirties. Whereas a }

grateful America had accolades for the superhuman feats of Owen

because Nazi Germany presented a foe common to whites and blacks, ; the Congress of the United States honored Jack Johnson by outlawing

interstate distribution of fights filmed live! Perhaps because of the threat presented by Jack Johnson's culture-rocking feat, a tactfully staged accident in a fictional fight film causes the

Afro-American character, Sam Bangford (patterned after the fighter

Sam Langford), to be kayoed by Anglo-American Kid Limburger of 16 Hoshkosh in Some White Hope (1915). Not only did Anglo-Americans not really want reality on the screen, they wanted deliberate lies to be fostered by he-men actors like Elmo Lincoln if their real-life heroes like Jim Jeffries could not sustain the myth of white superiority.

There also were myths created out of particular attributes of 157

reality in the film version of Tarzan of the Apes. Of the many

derogatory images of blacks in the film, two stand out. The first

are those associated with a burly African decked out in necklace,

plumed headpiece, and painted face, who is mischievously poking

innocent chicks in a nest. Before long his mischievousness turns to

maliciousness as he kills Kala the ape, Tarzan's foster mother, with

an arrow. This savagery catered to preconditioned audience attitudes

toward blacks and the incident created a foil for Tarzan. Tarzan and

his foster mother are innocents wantonly harmed by a savage. There

must be vengeance, a horrible exemplary vengeance in this case in the

form of death by strangulation. Thus, the African character (who is

not just any African, but a chief), is associated with malignant

aggression and inherent destructiveness. These forces of darkness

are perpetuated by a dark-skinned native of the Dark Continent. And

as the forces of the wilderness are turned against itself by the

western hero, so must these forces be contained through the singular

justice of a superior white man-ape, Tarzan.

In the transformation of book story to film story, a subtle and

revealing shift takes place in the characterization of Jane's

kidnappers. In the book, the kidnapper is Terkoz, successor to

Tarzan as leader of the ape tribe. Terkoz is a poor leader who is

ostracised from the tribe before long. Still raging, he is described

by Burroughs as a "horrible, man-like beast" who confronts Jane:

"she saw the awful face and the snarling, hideous mouth thrust within a foot of her" (p. 153). Instead of killing Jane, Terkoz decides to 158

keep this "hairless white ape" for his mate. The derogatory filmic translation of this scene is that a huge, black, bald-headed, paint-faced, diabolically-grinning African kidnaps Jane. Like Terkoz in the book--and like the first black character in the film, the chief who murdered Kala--this black "beast" is destroyed by Elmo

Lincoln-Tarzan. To have an ape kidnap Jane in the reader's imagination is okay, apparently, but on the screen the emotional encounter is far more volatile and the audience far more aggressive when it is a black man carrying off for his own the white and virtuous Jane. The racial overtones are similar to those in Birth of a Nation in which the apishness of Gus is considerably de-emphasized from the "gleaming apelike" appearance for which he was created in

Dixon's The Clansman', Gus' blackness is emphasized instead.

Other expectations are built on long-developing stereotypes rather than on the individual character an like Lincoln comes to personify. In Rastus in Zululand (1910), produced by Sigmund

Lubin, who made both the original Rastus and Sambo series between

1910 and 1911, a lazy Rastus dreams of being shipwrecked in Zululand, in Africa. The storyline is a repeat of the /Smith myth.

In this case, however, there is a comic twist in that the Princess is obese. An earlier variant on the Pocahontas plot is in The King of the Cannibal Islands (1908). This short also presents the comic complication of a rescue by a very fat black Queen. These obese

Princesses and Queens are pre-mammy figures, with the first fully developed mamtny image coming in the blackface film version of 159

Aristophanes' Lysistrata (1914). The mammy figure is close to the

comic coon image, but she is "distinguished by her sex and her fierce 1 independence. She is usually big, fat and cantankerous." Her

stereotypical offspring in the thirties would include Hattie McDaniel

and Louise Beavers in Aunt Jemima roles, and the thin, young version

of the mammy, Butterfly McQueen, immortalized as the handkerchief

head in her role as Prissy in Gone with the Wind (1939).

Esmeralda, Jane Porter's Afro-American nanny in Tarzan of the

Apes, book and film, belongs to this mammy tradition. She is a plump

Negress who accompanies Jane to Africa where the black African women

are naked from the waist up; Esmerald is adorned with a black and

white maid uniform and apron which are set off by the handkerchief

on her head. It is Anglo-American concepts of beauty, desirability,

and above all purity of white skin left over from the Cult of

Virginity in the Old South, that leads Terkoz the ape in the book,

and the huge and diabolical African in the film, to choose to kidnap

Jane and not Esmeralda who is at the time standing next to Jane. In

both size and color Esmerald certainly has the advantage over Jane when the fictional choice is for a practical mate of an ape or of a

huge African. To make sure that Tarzan can throw himself into the

rescue operation wholeheartedly, however, it is Jane who gets the nod.

Jane will endure the kidnapping with more finesse than Esmeralda would have. Even when Jane is in the arms of her kidnapper, it is

Esmeralda who swoons while Jane remains conscious. Esmeralda is the 160

only Afro-American brought to Africa by the Anglo-Americans

(excluding the "burly Negro" who, in the book, murders the captain of

the Fuwalda during the mutiny by splitting his head with an ax).

While never primitive like an African, Esmeralda is ignorant. She ds

the docile and dependent domestic who is the first to show fright and

the only one to laugh in serious situations. Her handkerchief head

tops a heavyset frame which is always in the uniform of a domestic,

which must be terrifically stuffy in the tropics. Aside from the

vaudevillian^humor which only she engages in, her function apparently

is to grin and cling to Jane to emphasize the white qualities which

Jane possesses.

The image of the black male in Tarzan of the Apes, on the other

hand, is that of the brute, the interloper whose sole purpose is to

create trouble for the white ape, Tarzan. All of the black

characters are in keeping with the expectations of the audience, for

there were in 1918 no expectations for blacks to appear in roles

other than those prescribed by traditions of prejudice and practice.

Concerning jungle films like Tarzan of the Apes, Thomas Cripps

contends in Slow Fade to Blaek (1977), efforts of Hollywood's Hays

Office to diminish dark-skinned villainy in films resulted in the drift away from Africans as the antagonists to Africans as "casual objects." As examples he cites the following films:

In 's vehicle, (1920), she impetuously orders her love killed, remorsefully wishes him alive, and when a Negro dies in his stead, "Madame is overjoyed that Culbertson escaped." ’s The Jungle Trail (1919) offers a white "god" who rules a tribe after "his great strength wins 161

him their worship," a gimmick topped by A White Barbarian (1923), a British picture featuring the "Songora tribe, who possess a white royal family."17

Once their stereotypical image is imbedded in a tradition like that of the jungle films, however, the mere presence of blacks in a jungle film will heighten audience expectations about what they will witness on the screen concerning the jungles of the Dark Continent. By 1918, is was clearly expected by film audiences that Tarzan the white must lord it over the apes and the blacks and the beasts; the fact that he is indeed an English Lord helped imbed the contrast in images.

Because he is an Anglo aristocrat he is culturally superior, though he chafes at the restrictiveness which accompanies the leadership roles. Of all the jungle's inhabitants, Tarzan alone is blessed with possession of the civilizing tool, the knife. He is inherently capable of learning on his own how to read and write

(according to the book version), something which the apes and blacks and probably all human beings are incapable of doing. He is a triumph of whiteness in the darkness of Africa, a darkness personified through the apes, the blacks, the beasts, and the jungle.

Birth of a Nation and Tarzan of the Apes seem to reflect prevailing national sentiments in the years 1915-1918. It would take less than a decade before the sentiments of the Afro-American community, previously engendered in the title of Booker T.

Washington's Up From Slavery (1901), shifted to the emphasis explicit in W.E.B. DuBois' Souls of Blaok Folk (1903). The necessary factors 162

were present already for an Afro-American consciousness which was to

flower in another decade through the greatest Afro-American

resurgence since Reconstruction. These early films help release

those myths which the cultural milieu of early twentieth-century

America absorbed like a sponge. But it is not so much the end or

culmination of an era that films like Birth of a Nation and Tarzan of

the Apes stand for but the beginning:

As far as blacks were concerned, the patterns set in these early motion pictures would remain unbroken not for years but for decades. The movie industry, as the black author John Oliver Killens has charged, may well have become "the most anti-Negro influence in this nation." Killens has also called the first real film masterpiece, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, "Hollywood's first big gun in its war against the black American." The castings for that gun were forged in the movies made between the mid-1890s and 1915.18

Tarzan of the Apes in 1918 did not deviate from the established mode of warfare. But contrary to the images of the African Continent which Tarzan of the Apes provided, it was really the American

Continent that was at its darkest in 1918, for of

Afro-Americans in the uniform of the United States Army were common and a film like Scott's Birth of a Race was neglected.

Tarzan is a mythic, larger-than-life creation nearly as pervasive in American culture as the myth of Anglo superiority itself. There are, despite the Teddy Roosevelts and Elmo Lincolns, \ no literal or even viable correspondences in reality to this filmic vision, this symbolic and mythic representation of reality. In

Tarzan, the myth of Anglo superiority is condensed and molded into the symbol of the White Ape. The film itself was geared for 163

understanding by a popular audience. The audience for whom the first

Tarzan film was made did believe in the magical images on the screen,

regardless of their accuracy.

Aside from being accessible and acceptable, these images in 19 popular Hollywood films are attractive. They are accessible when

they are easily understood; they are acceptable when the audience is

unperturbed by the appearance of an Afro-American or African image; and they are attractive when the Anglo-Americans identify with the natural superiority of the Anglo-American over the Afro-American or

African. But, "we cheered, too," laments Afro-American Francis Ward, • 20 "when Tarzan beat up or killed the Afrikan [sic] 'savages.t"

Afro-Americans in the audience often mentally transposed their roles and identified with the Anglo-Americans instead of the Afro-Americans or Africans in the films.

Early audiences viewing Afro-American and African images reacted intuitively. The communicated messages were irreversible, and the sustained images were what created the negativism and propaganda inherent in most early Afro-American and African film images. There was not time for consideration of an impression and the repeated barrages of images simply seeped in and saturated the subconscious of the viewers. In some ways the silent movies have exciting advantages, for "audiences amused themselves by shouting warnings or advice to the screen characters, whistling at the heroines, hissing 21 the villain and supplying appropriate bits of dialogue." As silent movies, the stereotypes were further exaggerated in imitation of live 164

theater.' These stereotypes may even be called archetypes, they are so consistent in equating black with inhumanity and soullessness.

Another aspect of this thesis worthy of mention is that cultural attitudes are reflected by exclusion, too. In terms of the immediate experience, the mood of the audience is important in determining how it responds to a set of Afro-American or African images and, oftentimes, the viewers select out what they want to see. Not allowing positive images of Afro-Americans or Africans also tends to reinforce cultural attitudes by not allowing optional models to choose from. The most extreme Anglo-American attitudes are reflected in exclusion, in not bringing into the picture on the screen any reflection whatsoever of the Afro-American or African. What are preserved in films and what are remembered by audiences, are the outstanding images, those images which have formed themselves in molds such as those presented by Birth of a Nation or Tarzan of the

Apes which can be traced back as entire genres of stereotypes and archetypes.

That which the audiences fail to remember, the bulk of the six or seven thousand films in which Afro-Americans and Africans have appeared in the twentieth century, also represents a stereotype, the stereotype of the faceless black image which bombards film investigators with the continual reinforcement that Afro-Americans and Africans exist, but that their existence is not worthy of a deeper probe that might put human faces where only the scantiest of images have been allowed. Afro-Americans and Africans in American 165

culture are outsiders. The Afro-American and African images are

given in part, not in whole, and certainly they are rarely humanly

full in their characterizations. Those black faces which are

recognized as stereotypes, then, are exceptions to the one great

stereotype of facelessness and as exceptions they have been the most

studied. Few significant Afro-American or African episodes ever

reach the screen, either, and when they do there is rarely an attempt

to be accurate, historically or in any other way. This negative

culture idea needs to be coped with in future studies which attempt

to account for these omissions.

Another form of exclusion is that Tarzan films have not been

considered serious material worthy of discussion in books on film.

The two books which deal specifically with Tarzan films, Ray Lee and

Vernell Coriell's A Pictorial History of the Tarzan Movies (1966) and

Gabe Essoe's Tarzan of the Movies: A Pictorial History of More Than

Fifty Tears of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Legendary Hero (1968), discuss

neither the historical and cultural context nor the reasons for the

popularity of the Tarzan genre of films. An exploration of these significant aspects might begin by first presenting an overview of the sparse materials available at present concerning the Tarzan genre of films.

The American-made Tarzan films often employed Afro-Americans to represent Africans beginning with the unfortunate chieftain who slays

Tarzan's foster mother, Kala, and is stalked and then choked to death by Tarzan. Books dealing with Afro-Americans in film, however, 166

neglect the ramifications of these representations of Africa and

Africans. The Marxist approach by V.P. Jerome in The Negro in

Hollywood Films (1950), for example, passes over the Tarzan films

entirely. Beyond the books by Essoe and by Lee and Coriell, the

exceptions to total neglect of this genre arise only when an author

must address a Tarzan film because it contains a particularly

striking incident or because an actor or actress under discussion

has appeared in a Tarzan film. Such is the case with the following

works, each of which purports to be on the Afro-American image in

film: In The Negro in Films (ca. 1948), Peter Noble notes without

elaboration that Rex Ingram played in "an early version of Tarzan of

the Apes, produced in 1920." In Blacks in American Films (1972),

Edward Mapp mentions an incident, in an unidentified Tarzan film, in which an Anglo's response when an African porter plunged to his death 23 was the question, "What was in that pack!" Afro-American Donald

Bogle, in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks (1973), refers

to James Edwards and Woody Strode in Tarzan's Fight for Life (1958), and to the vivacity of Dorothy Dandridge's spread and tied legs in 24 Tarzan 's Perils (1951).

Other books on film are scarcely better for they too lack revelation concerning the Tarzan genre. In To Find an Image (1973), also a book on Afro-Americans in film by an Afro-American, James P.

Murray offers the same reference to James Edwards and Woody Strode 25 in Tarzan's Fight for Life that Bogle did. Elsewhere he notes simply that Afro-Americans were hired for several films by "Woody" 167

Van Dyke of M-G-M, "beginning with Tarzan, The Ape Man in 1932, the

first of many African films shot in studio jungles--with studio

'Africans.'" Eileen Landay, in Blaok Film Stars (1973), reprints a

photograph from a film she incorrectly titles Tarzan (1920). Elmo

Lincoln is identified as the Tarzan in the still, but a Jane and a

"young savage" black are both unidentified and there is no discussion 27 of Tarzan or Tarzan films in her text.

A similar lack of attention is accorded Tarzan films in Jim

Pines' Blaoks in Films: A Survey of Racial Themes and Images in the

American Film (1974). He does use Tarzan in a mulched adjective when

he notes that with the rise of the southern plantation genre, "it was

really left to Trader Horn-Tarzan- types of movies to carry-on 28 the black image as a savage type." The only other mention of

Tarzan by Pines is not in the text but in the filmography. It is not a reliable reference for he states that Rex Ingram appeared in Tarzan ?Q of the Apes (1918).

Because an anthology serves a different function, it cannot be judged in the same manner as works which purport to offer systematic coverage of the black image in films. Nonetheless, it can be pointed out that of the twenty-seven articles compiled by Richard A. Maynard for The Blaok Man on Film: Racial Stereotyping (1974), none deal with or so much as mention Tarzan films; there is not even a Tarzan film listed in Maynard's filmography section for featured stereotypes from the thirties to the fifties. With the twenty-nine essays in Black

Films and Film-Makers (1975), compiled by Lindsay Patterson, the 168

situation is the same, though Patterson's filmography does,

inexplicably, list Tarzan's Perils (1951) with Dorothy Dandridge.

Daniel J. Leab misses the importance of the immensely popular

Tarzan films altogether in From Sambo to Superspade (1975). Skipping over the era between World War One and the Korean conflict, during which time three-quarters of the Tarzan films were produced, he gives

them a passing notice only in the context of the fifties. In the exotic locales of the Tarzan films, he states, "blacks were once again cast as ignorant and superstitious savages who could not stand 30 up to whites." This is short shrift for the Tarzan films, but not less than what previous writers on the black image in films had been allotting.

The most recent work on the black image in films is also the one in which, for the first time, Tarzan films are taken seriously. Both scholarly and readable, Thomas Cripps' Slow Fade to Black (1977) places Tarzan in the context of other films about Africa and in the context of what was going on in the civil rights arena. While emphasizing the film Tarzans, Cripps does not neglect the importance of the Tarzan series of romances by Edgar Rice Burroughs which, he writes,

rested on a firm base of nineteenth-century exploration and curiosity about the new anthropology and remote peoples, leavened by the safaris and hunts of Theodore Roosevelt and other public figures, and recent booms in conservationism and in western camping.31

Thus, Cripps' incisive work is the first to break with the tradition of books that deal with popular films about Afro-Americans but fail 169

to condescend to include the Tarzan films, the most popular films

and, along with the Tarzan series of books, the epitomy of popular

culture.

In addition to its context in American popular culture, an

analysis of the Afro-American and African characterizations in a film

like Tarzan of the Apes necessitates tapping the tradition of racism

at that point in history when America is on the verge of completing

her Manifest Destiny by showing her superiority over Europe. This

film is not, certainly, an adequate representation of Afro-Americans

and Africans. In their landmark treatment of the subject in "Ooga

Booga: The African Image in American Films," Alfred E. Opubur and

Adebayo Ogunbi go to the root of the issue when they remark that it

is

interesting to speculate on what would have happened to the African image as projected in American films and popular culture if Burroughs had never been born. Although the Tarzan films made from his novels constitute only a small proportion of American motion pictures on Africa, their point of view and image of Africa have had an almost preemptive impact on American film making about Africa. Besides they have become the most widely distributed and most frequently repeated .. American-produced films on Africa.32

What is present in a film like Tarzan of the Apes, unfortunately, has too often been interchangeably identified with information about

Afro-Americans and Africans, about Afro-American and African themes and problems, and about Afro-American and African cultures.

The identification of some of the symbols supporting the White

Ape Myth hopefully point to aspects of a theory of popular film. In the final analysis, a film cannot be looked at as an historical 170

document any more than it can be looked at as a literary document.

It must be studied as a cultural document, as an artifact in the larger sense of being applicable to all approaches and to both new and established investigatory techniques. Many of the suggestive filmic symbols identifiable in Tarzan of the Apes no longer work, for instance. The audience reaction to the film in 1918 was much different than it is today—if undergraduate literature and film students viewing it for the first time are any indication—both because of artistic and technical advances in the film arts and because of the dated form in which its ideas are presented.

The myths in a film like Tarzan of the Apes represent an interpretation and an ordering of experience in the culture. This film is a creative example of the mythic Golden Age, even to the extreme of recreating the timeless Adam and Eve in Eden through

Tarzan and Jane in the jungle. This Golden Age theme is present in various manifestations in all eras, but it/is strongly associated . with America's dreams of lost lands whether they are in the pulps like the Tarzan story, in the rhetoric of variations on the Ku Klux

Kian like the empire-advocating Knights of the Golden Circle, in films like Birth of a Nation which venerate a nineteenth and early twentieth century lost southland and lost southern race, or in the reality of America's conquests under the bloody banner of the "white man's burden." Chapter Five

Tarzan and the Ku Klux Kian:

Anglo-Americanism in the Twenties

The door flew open with a crash, and four black brutes leaped into the room, Gus in the lead, with a revolver in his hand, his yellow teeth grinning through his thick lips. "Scream now, an1 I blow yer brains out," he growled. Blanched with horror, the mother sprang before [her daughter] with a shivering cry: "What do you want?" "Not you," said Gus, closing the blinds and handing a rope to another brute. "Tie de ole one ter de bedpost." The mother screamed. A blow from a black fist in her mouth, and the rope was tied. With the strength of despair she tore at the cords, half rising to her feet, while with mortal anguish she gasped: "For God's sake, spare my baby! Do as you will with me, and kill me--do not touch her!" Again the huge fist swept her to the floor. Marion staggered against the wall, her face white, her delicate lips trembling with the chill of a fear colder than death. "We have no money--the deed has not been delivered," she pleaded,; a sudden glimmer of hope flashing in her blue eyes. Gus stepped closer, with an ugly leer, his flat nose dilated, his sinister bead eyes wide apart, gleaming apelike, as he laughed: "We ain't atter money!" The girl uttered a cry, long, tremulous, heart-rending, piteous. A single tiger spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat and she was still.

From Reverend Thomas Dixon's The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Kian (1905), pp. 303-304.

Reverend Thomas Dixon's The Clansman: An Historical Romance of Yll

the Ku Klux Kian (1905),discussed briefly in the previous chapter,

was a very popular book in early twentieth-century America. Its

conscious cultivation of racial hatred, as illustrated in' the

episode quoted above, is rarely matched, even by such notoriously

racist authors as Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote

during the period between the Spanish-American War and World War

One. Such disgracefully racist scholars as Woodrow Wilson, a

classmate of Thomas Dixon!s at Johns Hopkins University, cannot

match the vituperation of Dixon, whom the National Association for

the Advancement of Colored Peoples1 The Crisis described in a

remarkably restrained tone:

Small wonder that a man who.can thus brutally falsify history has never been able to do a single piece of literary work that has brought the slightest attention, except when he seeks to capitalize burning race antagonisms.2

Also a peer of Wilson's, the historian John W. Burgess claimed that

"there is something natural in the subordination of an inferior race

to a superior race" in his widely read Reconstruction and the

Constitution, 1866-1876 (1902).In 1907, Woodrow Wilson himself described the era of Reconstruction with choppy claims that an amorphous "they," Afro-Americans,

once slaves) now free; impractical in liberty, unschooled in self control; never sobered by the discipline of self support; never established in any habit of prudence; excited by a freedom they did not understand,4 mishandled their chance at citizenship.

Dixon's The Clansman, and to a lesser degree another of his

"Southern Trilogy," The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White 173

c Man’s Burden, 1865-1900 (1902), were the inspiration for the last

half of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), a film celebrating

the rise of the Ku Klux Kian after the Civil War; the first half is

based in part on A History of the American People (1902), written by

Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States when Birth of a

Nation was made. The film arrived at the New Nixon Theater in

Atlanta, Georgia, in time for a premier showing concurrent with the

solemn and fiery creation fifteen miles away on Stone Mountain of

William Joseph Simmons' new Knights of the Ku Klux Kian. It was a

Thanksgiving night in a climate inculcating a virus of hostility

toward anything unorthodox, non-conformist, or just out of the ordinary. Both the film Kian and the new Kian celebrated the principles of the Cult of Chivalry, the idolization of Motherhood and the chastity of (Anglo-American) Womanhood, Fraternity, a glorification of the pre-Civil War South and the superiority of

Anglo-Saxons, Christianity (Protestant), and, by their torch lights, a one hundred per cent Americanism.

Incompetence in caring for themselves is imputed to

Afro-Americans in early twentieth-century America--!'f the message of

The Clansman and Birth of a Nation is believed. Freedom has created the likes of Gus, shown at his ripest in the epigraph from The

Clansman and in Birth of a Nation?' Dixon's description of Gus, aside from his use of the stereotypical Afro-American images of a grinning and laughing thick-lipped brute, is seething with maniacal impressions of the black as a beast: "his flat nose dilated, his 174

sinister bead eyes wide apart, gleaming apelike" as he takes on the

attributes of a leaping tiger whose claws, black in this case, are

ripping the jugular of virgin white women like Marion. In the film

version, Marion leaps to "the sweet gates of death" from a precipice

rather than submit to the devilish aggressions of the demented Gus;

in the book, both mother and daughter take the leap after the

despoilment of young Marion which apparently made her unfit for any

further intercourse with Anglos.

When the subject is an Afro-American, Dixon's literary imagery

invokes the primeval jungle where beasts prey wantonly. It is .

little different from that which Burroughs later used so that Tarzan could effect his frequent rescues of white women. The primitive and the barbaric in man, associated primarily with Africans and

Afro-Americans, are what the Ku Klux Kian intended to eradicate.

William Joseph Simmons, Founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Kian and Emperor of the Invisible Empire, addressed the American public frankly on this issue:

Why should the simple truth give offense to anybody? The Negro in Africa is a childish barbarian. Left to himself he has never at any time or place evolved even the beginning of a civilization. Do what we may in the way of an education, the mind of the pure Negro, compared to the white, on the average does not get beyond the age of twelve years. To ignore this fact is to get into error from the start.3

This argument, pervasive in some quarters right up to today, implies that it is not a matter of the Ku Klux Kian being anti-black, but a matter of biological inferiority on the part of Africans and

Afro-Americans which cannot be corrected; it, therefore, must be 175

accepted candidly, as Simmons has done, so that it can be dealt with

patronizingly.

Jim Crow laws, emanating from the "separate but equal" Supreme

Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), proliferated during the

1900-1920 era. A startling shift in population occurred between

1890, when 19.8% of the Afro-American population lived in cities, and 1920, when 40% of the Afro-American population lived in cities.?

In the year the film Tarzan of the Apes (1918) was released race

riots were taking place in various areas of the country, many

spawned by the dislocation coming about through the influx from

south to north of both Afro-Americans and Anglo-Americans with their

already-instilled prejudices. For the Anglo-Americans, these

prejudices included a proclivity toward the resurgent Ku Klux Kian.

The period of-the Kian's greatest political impact in America 8 came between 1921 and 1926 as a highly visible political party which, at least temporarily, waived some of its secrecy. However, an unsigned letter dated 16 May 1921 from an Imperial Officer of the

Kian to D.W. Griffith, producer of Birth of a Nation, begins with the following paragraphs:

You are doubtless aware that the Ku Klux Kian is contemplating the production of a photo play which will portray the activities of the present day Kian and the things for which the organization stands. It is the ambition of the Kian to make this production the best that has ever been presented to the American public and with this idea firmly in our minds, we feel that you are the only logical director for such a task. We came to this conclusion not merely due to your splendid work in the past, but also because of your known sentiments regarding the work of the Ku Klux Kian. 176

Of course you appreciate the fact that if certain producers should obtain the right to put on such a photo play, they might try by insidious methods to give it a twist which would work to the detriment of the Kian. Knowing full well the personnel of the motion picture field in general, you will readily understand our suggestion that the utmost discretion be used in discussing this matter with anyone.9

This letter is a revealing document, written at the time when the

Kian was launching its greatest semi-legal political campaigns

across the nation.. The secrecy enshrouding the letter's contents is

not the result of ritual but of motives. It suggests the

illegitimacy of the Kian's activities and the resultant persecution

complex for which the Kian, along with similar marginal right wing

groups in America from the National Socialist White Peoples Party to

the Jehovah's Witnesses, are famous for manufacturing.

Despite their tactics, they did sway large numbers of voters in

the elections of 1922, 1924, and in drastic decline, 1926, even

though there was an investigation of the Ku Klux Kian by the House

of Representatives in October 1921. Perhaps, as frequently happens with controversial movements, media attacks and governmental

investigations increase the momentum of the movement, at least in

the short run. A stanza from a popular twenties song illustrates

the proclivity to join:

Mother never dares to ask friends for overnight. When she looks for covers clean, There's not a sheet in sight: Daddy swiped our last clean sheet and joined the Ku Klux Kian.10

Inconclusive as the House hearings were concerning the fast growing

Kian, they raised far more questions, like the place of vigilantism 177

in American political life, than ever before about the nature and

aims of the Klansmen who hid their white skins under symbolic white

robes and masks.

While he is in the jungle, Tarzan celebrates his white identity

by never covering it up, a technique which has greater appeal apparently since Tarzan survived the twenties with more clout ;

in the media than did the Ku Klux Kian. Irwin Porges, Burroughs' official biographer, relates a story of one manifestation of the subconscious equation of Tarzan with the major symbol of American patriotism: "A teacher asked a little boy to explain the word

'Tarzan.' The boy said: 'It is the name of a flag.' 'How do you make that out?' asked the teacher indulgently. 'Why,' said the boy, 'the flag of America—Tarzan Stripes.'"11 One resident of the antithesis of the jungle, , thought enough of Tarzan's leadership abilities to propose that he be elected President of the 12 United States in the Depression year of 1932.

The psychological appeal these values had, particularly for the joiners and superpatriots among Anglo-Americans in the era beginning just before World War One, is evidenced by the rebirth of the Kian and the appearance of major films like Birth of a Nation and Tarzan of the Apes. But others, not necessarily in sympathy with the ideas of the Kian, held similar values. Gordon Mills, in "Jack London's

Quest for Salvation," describes the era's most popular American author as fostering a form of individualism which

often appears in a political context, but it is first to be understood as simply a romantic desire for intense experience. 178

In what may be regarded as its simplest phase, it is outright escape from responsibility.!3

Such irresponsibility often led authors like London to produce only

the vilest of images when he wrote of Afro-Americans, South Sea

Islanders, or Chinese, Portuguese, and Japanese immigrants on the

West Coast. London's sometime sidekick, Joseph Noel, recalling in

1940 an evening at the fights with London and George Sterling, the

nearly forgotten poet:

There was an interesting pug battling his way to a commanding position among the cauliflower aristocracy. With gimlet eyes devoid of intelligence, over-hanging eyebrows, prognathous jaw, head placed almost directly on a pair of hummocky shoulders without the intervening neck, and great hands swinging on sinewy arms far below his knees, Walcott looked like a bronze ape that had been taught to perform stunts. One of these was battering into insensibility everyone he could coax into a roped square with him. He could take more punishment than any prize fighter of his time. Walcott was a Barbados Negro who stood five feet one...... Walcott's simian attitudes, his ferocious grin, his indifference to the opponent's staggering blows, did more to prove Darwin was right than a dozen lectures on man's place in nature.14

The descriptions are quite close to those which London himself wrote

when as a journalist he covered the major prize fights of the decade

before World War One. Noel's passage is probably referring to

Jersey Joe Walcott, incidentally, although Noel fails to civilize 15 this famous fighter even to the extent of giving him a full name.

The pervasiveness of other forms of irresponsible prejudice in

America is virulently mocked by H.L. Mencken in his satiric defense of the rights of the Ku Klux Kian on the basis that they represent no more and no less than the views of all upstanding 179

American institutions. By quoting H.L. Mencken at the beginning of

his absorbing book, David M. Chalmers establishes the context in

which he treats the Ku Klux Kian in Hooded Americanism (1965):

Not a single solitary sound reason has yet been advanced for putting the Ku Klux Kian out of business. If the Kian is against the , so are half of the good hotels of the Republic and three-quarters of the good clubs. If the Kian is against the foreign-born or the hyphenated citizen, so is the National Institute of Arts and Letters. If the Kian is against the Negro, so are all of the states south of the Mason-Dixon line. If the Kian is for damnation and persecution, so is the Methodist Church. If the Kian is bent upon political control, so are the American Legion and Tammany Hall. If the Kian wears grotesque uniforms, so do the Knights of Pythias and the Mystic Shriners. If the Kian conducts its business in secret,.so do the police, the letter-carriers and firemen. If the Kian's officers bear ridiculous names, so do the officers of the Lambs' Club. If the Kian uses the mails for shaking down suckers, so does the Red Cross. If the Kian constitutes itself a censor of private morals, so does the Congress of the United States. If the Kian lynches a Moor for raping someone's daughter, so would you or I.16

Racist values were obviously more widespread in the twenties than only among the supporters of the Kian. The reason the Kian was singled out for attack was not because of its values, surely, but because of the ruthless methods of violent coercion it used in imposing those values.

Regardless of their methods, the heavy responsibility of the nineteenth-century "white man's burden" was unselfishly shouldered by men like William Joseph Simmons. Their attitudes parallel the attitudes toward Africans in the Tarzan romances as well. Tarzan and the Ku Klux Kian, for instance, both opposed having too much of the machine in the garden. While Edgar Rice Burroughs' fictions could end in harmony re-established on his Dark Continent of Africa, 180

the Kian had to face technology in a literal rather than a literary

way on that other Dark Continent of America. The rhetorical

approach of the Kian was to dismantle the centers of industrialism,

the cities. The rural roots and rural values of the Kian, despite

their extension of political power into the cities in the twenties,

sustained their revolt against the giantism of the cities and the

governments. They questioned the concept of progress prevalent in

America. Simmons, in The Kian Unmasked (1923), states that

America's "piled up statistics of 'progress' mostly prove our degeneracy."1? Americans think in terms of giantism, he contends,

and Americans have come to believe that they must have giant lakes,

giant mountains, and giant competitions to be the most productive.

The same Social Darwinism which he rejects when applied to material

culture, he accepts in his philosophy of an evolution of higher and

lower races of people. Anglo-Saxons, particularly Anglo-Americans,

are not only born superior, he claims, they are bred through the years to be superior and they have indeed won out, most recently in

the Great War. This alluring social philosophy of the born

superior, bred superior, Anglos is critical not only to the

popularity of the Kian in the twenties, but to the popularity of

the white master of the Dark Continent, Tarzan,* Lord of the Jungle,

in the twentieth century.

The assumption that only can build a • civilization—that, as Simmons stated it, the African "has never at any time or place evolved even the beginning of a civilization" — 181

comes through clearly in the thirteen Tarzan books published before

the end of the twenties. Tarzan is a delicately-balanced walker of

the tightrope strung between civilization and the primitive. In contrast to the background Africans, he is a civilizing influence because he has, as an Anglo, a moral code and the ability to justly impose law and order on that wildest of frontiers, the jungle. But

Tarzan is also a primitive and the contrast between him and most

Anglo-Americans increases as the world becomes more modern; partially for this reason, Tarzan's popularity increased at its fastest pace during the twenties.

To carry further the Anglo argument that Africans cannot be civilized, it is true that whenever a lost city or lost empire is found again in the darkest depths of Tarzan's Africa, the remnants of that once-great civilization, as with the remnants of that once-great civilization in the southern portion of America, invariably reveal that it was built by whites! Burroughs may be the champion proponent in the pulps of this theme, as five of his

Tarzan adventures from the twenties reveal: Africa's lost civilization of Pal-ul-don in Tarzan the. Terrible (1921) and Pygmy

Minuni in Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924) are both peopled by whites, as is the familiar Opar in Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1923), the medieval knighthood in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (1928), again with suggestive parallels to the medievalism of the Old South and the new

Knighthood of the Ku Klux Kian, and the Rome-like empire in Tarzan and the Lost Empire (1929). 182

Despite these manifestations of technology in the jungle,

without which the lost empires could not stand as demonstrations of

the advanced white civilizations, Tarzan is anti-science and

anti-technology. The idea of the Kian's Invisible Empire, on the

other hand, connoted far more than masked identities, for it was

meant more as a spiritual than a material empire ruled over by an

Imperial Wizard; no wizard, but emanating a presence throughout his

jungle empire, Tarzan too wields an invisible spiritual Lordship.

As a young man, Tarzan's most advanced weapon is a knife, a

super-icon which designates the thin, sharp edge between the

primitive and the civilized which so marks his character. Personal

icons of equal importance are his golden locket, indicative of his

heritage, and the log cabin his parents built--that all-American

symbol of humble origins for great leaders--which offers him a haven wherein he makes his first advances from the primitive to the civilized through his discovery of the knife and the books,

including a primer full of bugs. Tarzan often returns to participate in the Dum Dum with the apes; their orgiastic Death

Dance is a ritual of renewal that rivals the gathering of the

Ku Klux Kian with its fiery crosses illuminating and renewing a crusader vigor and a spiritual purity. Instead of Dum Dums, the

Kian held parades and rallies at which were sung songs like "The

Bright Fiery Cross" and "Onward Christian Klansmen." Many of these songs were recorded by the 100% Americans on the Ku Klux Kian label which has a bloodr-red background with gold print and a flaming cross 183

as identifiers. A pre-1925 parade song used by the Kian, "Come Join

the Ku Klux Kian in the Old Town Tonight," broadcasts the ideas and attitudes which millions of Americans responded to in the early

twenties:

Come along all you Klansmen in your brand new gowns For there's going to be a meeting in this good old town Where you know everybody and they all know you And you've got a sacred heritage to carry you through.

When you see the Kian on dress parade Never fear for the faith in God is paid And pledged to stand for law and order every day Come join the Ku Klux in the old town tonight.’ ..

Oh, if and when you hear the band begin to play White-robed men on horses lead the way And what a sight we'll be with a thousand in array Come join the Ku Klux in the old town tonight.

They'll be room for one flag only in the old U.S,A. And those peoples will be speaking English every day When the Bible is respected and its read in the schools And the Constitution honored by all those who rule.

When you see the cross begin to burn Gather round and fearlessly you'll learn Of what the Kian stands for [throw out the unconcerned] Come join the Ku Klux in the old town tonight/3

Swinging right along: In the book version of Tarzan of the Apes,

Tarzan battles Terkoz the ape for possession of Jane, whom Terkoz has kidnapped. The passage concerning the battle, Jane's and

Tarzan's perceptions of one another, and the dichotomies the author establishes to play off the civilization versus the primitive, theme, gives a flavor of Burroughs' appeal that is worth an extensive reproduction:

Like two charging bulls they came together, and like two wolves sought each other's throat. Against the long canines of 184

the ape was pitted the thin blade of the man's knife. Jane—her lithe, young form flattened against the trunk of a great tree, her hands tight pressed against her rising and falling bosom, and her eyes wide with mingled horror, fascination, fear, and admiration-watched the primordial ape battle with the primeval man for possession of a woman—for her. As the great muscles of the man's back and shoulders knotted beneath the tension of his efforts, and the huge biceps and forearm held at bay those mighty tusks, the veil of centuries of civilization and culture was swept from the blurred vision of the girl. When the long knife drank deep a dozen times of Terkoz' heart's blood, and the great carcass rolled lifeless upon the ground, it was a primeval woman who sprang forward with outstretched arms toward the primeval man who had fought for her and won her. And Tarzan? He did what no red-blooded man needs lessons in doing. He took his woman in his arms and smothered her upturned, panting lips with kisses. For a moment Jane lay there with half-closed eyes. For a moment—the first in her young life—she knew the meaning of love. But as suddenly as the veil had been withdrawn it dropped again, and an outraged conscience suffused her face with its scarlet mantle, and a mortified woman thrust Tarzan of the Apes from her and buried her face in her hands. Tarzan had been surprised when he had found the girl he had learned to love after a vague and abstract manner a willing prisoner of his arms. Now he was surprised that she repulsed him. He came close to her once more and took hold of her arm. She turned upon him like a tigress, striking his great breast with her tiny hands. Tarzan could not understand it. (pp. 155-156)

Tarzan's major flaw perhaps is his inability to turn to their mutual advantage a situation like this in which he and Jane acknowledge their primeval selves and discover the initial raptures of physical love all within a few moments. But there are also overtones of the racial struggle in this scene as well. To have a black kidnap a white for a mate raises the spector of miscegenation. Not even 185

the ape Terkoz, who considers Jane mate material in the book version

of Tarzan of the Apes, makes the impression on the mind of

Anglo-Americans that is made in having a giant black man kidnap a

white woman, which is what happens to Jane in the film version of 20 Tarzan of the Apes. Audiences caught the intent, and ideologues

like the Kian's Simmons broadcast the intent through advocating the

position that miscegenation is the critical problem in race

relations. If there is no mixing of bloodlines--if the African or

Afro-American remains a "pure Negro"—there is less likelihood of

problems; particularly, Simmons would point out, when it is the

mulattoes like Frederick , Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B.

DuBois who become the leaders of the Afro-American community.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' work is still being manipulated for

profit in racially demeaning ways. The most recent printing of The

Return of Tarzan in 1976, for instance, has a cover by

which depicts Tarzan with spear in hand staving off a lion from a

helpless African who is behind him on the ground. But on pages

123-124 the reader learns that the African is saving Tarzan from

this lion, and that it is the African who heaved the spear which

stopped the lion from reaching Tarzan, and not the other way around!

Not that the cover art for pulps is supposed to depict precisely what is in the book; it is supposed to, as this one undoubtedly does, sell the book. It is the kind of alteration, however, consciously carried out or not, that should be challenged.

Symptomatic of what is often done to the African image, such 186

alterations probably go back much further in the Anglo traditions of

popular art even than filmmakers making into a black man the brown-skinned Caribbean named Friday in Daniel Defoe's Robinson

Crusoe (1719).

The ritualistic convention of the white man saving the white woman from the most hideous of consequences has numerous ties to the

Indian captivity narratives which have so intrigued the American reading public, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing into the twentieth century. It is a feat which Tarzan manages to carry off as many as a half-dozen times in each of his book-length adventures. This convention is a vestige of the Old South's culture of chivalry, too, a tradition so strong in the pulp literature of authors like Dixon and Burroughs that for the audience, as well as for the characters, no sacrifice is too high to protect the Anglo goddesses. Love of the goddesses like Dixon's Marion or the pre-wife Jane is an abstraction, a social obligation similar to the courtly love of medieval days and nights which the Old South revered.

Another convention in the formula has Tarzan patriotically eliminating or deporting intruders who invariably upset the harmony of Tarzan's existence, despoil the jungle, and violate the moral order Tarzan has imposed. The Ku Klux KLan's stance is analogous and in its campaigns for public office it capitalized politically on the new generation of immigration laws being implemented in America.

The ineffective literacy test law in 1917 led to the 1921 act which 187

set the immigration quota of any nation at three per cent of those

from that nation already in American by 1910. The 1924 act included 21 much stricter quotas, and added the proviso that the smaller

quotas go to non-white countries.

Writers like Burroughs and Sax Rohmer helped foster the

attitude that it was necessary to keep non-whites in their places,

their places being outside the United States. Rohmer authored

numerous "Yellow Peril" pulps in the twenties and thirties,

including the more than forty Dr. Fu Manchu books which he first began publishing in 1913, the year after the "Black Peril" pulps of

Tarzan began to be serialized. The setting happens to be Africa, but Tarzan is protecting American values and the American way of . life when his rejection of foreign intruders is converted into the phase of patriotic and ethnocentric isolationism which began with the felling of President Wilson and his League of Nations. These attitudes barely acknowledged the dangers of rearmament taking place in Germany and Japan; and, of equal long-term significance domestically, led only to superficial and whimsical appreciation of the great Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties.

Not so ironically as it might at first appear, the intruders and immigrants in both Burroughs Africa and the Kian's America were primarily Caucasians. Patriotism operated in tandem with

Anglo-Americanism, and not pan-Caucasianism, as was borne out by the debacle of white civilization slaughtering white civilization during

World War One. Few white strains, in fact, were judged to be on a 188

par with Anglo-Saxons, and Anglo-Americans and their British

cousins were seeking to be the most superior of all Caucasians.

Closer to home, a threat to Anglo superiority was played out by

Pancho Villa when he crossed into New and attacked the town

of Columbus in March 1916. Retribution, couched in the same

jingoism directed at the "Yellow Peril" and the "Black Peril,"

became a matter of national pride. The frantic John J. Pershing

took until June to catch up with the villistas after his military

invasion of Mexico. Among those Americans killed in this

irresponsible demonstration of Anglo superiority were ten

Afro-American soldiers. Nonetheless, the primary target for repression in America was blacks, in Tarzan's instance Africans and

in the Kian's instance Afro-Americans.

Being in a position of leadership, whether as King of the

Beasts or as President of the United States, was tenuous during this era. Roderick Nash contends, in The Nervous Generation: American

Thought, 1917-1930 (1970), that contrary to the image of the twenties as roaring, the mainstream American culture continued to rest kitten-like on a bedrock of nineteenth-century morality.

Indeed, it looked backwards toward the nineteenth century more than 22 it looked forward into the twentieth century for its values.

Certainly this was true of the values projected by the Ku Klux Kian and Tarzan for both came from nineteenth-century mindsets.

Nash claims that this nervousness, resulting from the tension of familiarly old with drastically new, sums up the generation 189

between World War One and the Great Depression. This nervousness

was the result of changes which had a momentum of their own. Some

of the changes which prompted the nervousness of this generation of

Americans include the world-wide Great War and its ramifications in

shifting power alliances in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the specter of

world-wide revolution after the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the

almost immediate implementation of new technology on a massive scale

to produce what was the greatest consumer decade in the history of

mankind. In grasping for safe cultural stand-bys, the twenties'

generation found Tarzan and the Ku Klux Kian ready; they found in

them advocates of authoritarian law and order, patriotic

isolationism, and opposition to the encroachment of the machine into

their still primarily rural garden; they found in them fantastic

conquerors of lost lands and lost races which replaced the already

consumated imperialistic impulses of America. Most importantly,

Tarzan and the Ku Klux Kian reinforced their supremacy as Anglos in

American culture.

In the fall of 1916, within a year of the founding of the modern Ku Klux Kian, a young boy named Herman Newman from/Staunton',

Virginia, wrote to Edgar Rice Burroughs with the idea of creating a 24 Tribe of Tarzan. Intrigued, Burroughs accepted card number one in 25 the Tribe of Tarzan. Burroughs then proceeded to dream up the codes, rites, and oaths for a fraternal order of youths much like that of the freshly revived Ku Klux Kian. Members of the Tribe of

Tarzan were obligated to precepts which blended Horatio Alger ethics 190

with the Ten Commandments:

I will obey the Chief of the Tribe of Tarzan. I will be honest, courteous and truthful. I will think clean thoughts and form clean habits. I will protect the weak. I will train my body to be strong and healthy. I will do unto others as I would that others should do unto me. I will bear pain as Tarzan bore it, without complaint and in silence.26

A medallion representing Tarzan's golden locket was struck for the

Tribe, and Burroughs asked Bob Davis to make his All-Story Magazine

the official organ of the Tribes of Tarzan; Davis declined. Another

of Burroughs' suggestions was for each Tribe to have its own

"African totem" so that there would be a Numa Tribe and a

Tribe, and so on, similar to the regimentation around animals of Sir

Robert Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts which were established a decade

earlier in 1907.

Baden-Powell was a career soldier stationed in various parts of

Africa and India. A veteran of the Boer War, his military training

provided the model for his formation of the Boy Scouts. There were

earlier attempts to establish scout-like activities in America.

Ernest Thompson Seton suggested in 1902, in articles written for the

Ladies' Home Journal, that a male youth group called Woodcraft

Indians be founded; Daniel C. Beard started the Sons of

and the Boy Pioneers before 1905. Both Seton and Beard dropped ■'

their own creations and joined with the Boy Scout Movement in 1907 27 when it came to America. The Wolf Cubs idea for very young boys 28 came from Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli in The Jungle Books (1894-1895) 191

Burroughs' totem idea for the Tarzan Tribes was a similar

application of the animal cult which was not confined to youths,

certainly, for there were the Lions, Lambs, and Elks, and so on,

for adults.

In the beginning, Burroughs was highminded about the aims of

the Tribes of Tarzan. The publicity for the Tribes, nonetheless,

continued to be tied to the publication of Tarzan materials. When

the subject was raised again in 1927 it was as a promotion for the

publication of the juvenile Tarzan book, The Tarzan Twins (1927), 29 "the goal being to stimulate sales." No exact information on the

number of members is available for the twenties, but Herman Newman

apparently organized Tarzan Tribes in "many cities." As a promotion

for the new Tarzan in 1929, The Pittsbury Press created 30 a "grand Tribe of Tarzan" with a thousand members.

Signal Oil Company, the sponsor of the first radio Tarzan

series, created a Tarzan Club in California which had 125,000 31 members by the end of 1933! It was this success which led

Burroughs to envision a national Tarzan Clans of America with a

membership in the range of two million. To this end, Burroughs

proposed in 1933 what would become the Official Guide of the Tarzan

Clans of America. In 1935, Burroughs suggested using the still

unwritten Official Guide as a theater handout to promote The New

Adventures of Tarzan, a Tarzan film then in the making. After it was finally written and published in 1939, Burroughs again suggested that it be used in promoting Tarzan, specifically 192

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Tarzan Finds a Son (1939). The film's theme made it a natural for launching the Clans since the hope of being

that Boy, that adopted son of Tarzan, would be very appealing to youngsters interested in the Tarzan Clans of America.

As with its more famous cousin in the secred orders, the Ku

Klux Kian, the first order of the Tarzan Clans was that "the contents of this Guide are for the information of members only, and the Guide should never be shown to a non-member nor any of its 32 contents divulged to any but members and honorary members.'.'

The rituals, hierarchy, and goals of the Tarzan Clans were contained in the thirty-two page Official Guide of the Tarzan Clans of „ .

America, the table of contents of which reads like a primitive primer for Robert's Rules of Order:

CONTENTS PAGE Organization 3 How to Form a Tarzan Clan 3 Second Class Warriors 5 Duties of Officers 5 Chief 5 Sub-Chief 5 Medicine Man 6 Scribe 6 High Priest 6 Honorary Clan Members 6 Girls 7 What to do at Meetings 7 Initiation 8 Tarzan Pledge 9 Grip 10 Pass Words 10 What Tarzan Stands For 10 Rating 11 Transfers 12 Totem 13 Big Medicine 13 Games 13 193

Field Meets 17 Judges for Field Meets 19 Clan Songs 20 Clan Dance 24 How to Make Weapons 24 Punishments 26 Dismissing a Member 27 Demoting a Chief 28 Dictionary of the Apes Language 2833

The purposes of the Tarzan Clans of America and the Official Guide 34 were straightforward: publicity and promotion. A promotional gimmick for Burroughs' books, the Tarzan Clans were a failure even though

the membership enticements were most alluring: for the sum of $1.00 you would receive your membership card and the Official Guide, and, as a special bonus, a complimentary copy of a new Burroughs first edition-autographed by the author¡35

Henry Heins, member number thirty-nine of the Tarzan clans, attributes a higher ideal to Burroughs' Tarzan Clans than the desire to promote Tarzan books:

The Clan idea seems to have been conceived and developed by Mr. Burroughs, not as a business proposition, but to capitalize on the universal popularity of Tarzan in those days by the official establishment of neighborhood Clans of ten or more boys (with adult supervision, in the form of a "High Priest"), to encourage participation in athletics and the outdoor life among American youth, based on Tarzan's high principles of fairmindedness and the protection of wildlife from needless killing. The organization of the Clans, as spelled out in the Guide, was to be patterned after the tribal councils of the apes and the black men in the Burroughs books.3^

The most popular film Tarzan, , fittingly was 37 named Chief of Chiefs of the Tarzan Clans of America in 1939.

The promotional scheme is plain and Heins' idealism is more in line with the earlier Tribes of Tarzan, for while they too were inspired 194

to promote they had the enthusiasm of a younger, more optimistic

Burroughs behind them.

As with "The Kloran"--"The White Book"--which formats the 38 celebrations of the Ku Klux Kian, Burroughs' Tarzan books are a celebration of a conservative Americanism. Tarzan is clearly an

American figure, though given the eminence of an English Lord to make all the more vivid the contrast between his civilized heritage and his primitive environment. With reverence for a lost civilization in the South and hostility toward the unorthodox, particularly Afro-Americans and their culture, the Ku Klux Kian represents an active form of the Anglo-Americanism found more passively in the Tarzan series. The conservative, often reactionary, attitudes expressed by Tarzan and the Ku Klux Kian did frequent battle with the liberal and progressive attitudes and, in so doing, helped to create what Roderick Nash has aptly named "the nervous generation." Although American culture has continued to move slowly away from what Tarzan and the Ku Klux Kian espouse, they remain less active but still vibrant manifestations of the radically conservative perspective prominant in the twenties, and present in much twentieth-century American thought. Both, for instance, had a massive resurgence of popularity in the sixties, reflecting again their appeal to the old values in a period of bewildering cultural changes.ranging from sexual mores to civil rights for non-Anglos.

No official relationship existed between the Tarzan Clans of

America and the Ku Klux Kian, but their similarities point to the 195

fact that the values they stood for were widely held. Though the

zeal of overt racism and fanatic demonstrations of the Ku Klux Kian

did not find its way to the youthful Tarzan Clans, both shared such

conventions as a High Priest, initiations, pledges, pass words, and

symbolic totems. Both were duty-bound clans emphasizing strict

adherence to the laws of the United States and the honors of

patriotism, even if so shortsighted a patriotism as that associated with isolationism.

The Tribes of Tarzan were formed just prior to America's

intervention in World War One, and the Tarzan Clans were launched just prior to World War Two. With its American armies of tens of millions, World War Two fed a far larger system of regimentation, hierarchy, and ideas with which the youth as well as the elders would have to cope. Unlike the résiliant Ku Klux.Kian, the Tarzan

Clans of America did not survive the Greater War, World War Two. Chapter Six

America, the Dark Continent

"Africa is the Dark Continent," the narrator states in the opening scene of Tarzan and the Trappers (1966), and Tarzan's law prevails "in this vast land where there is no other law."

The Tarzan series of Edgar Rice Burroughs, beginning with the

All-Story Magazine serialization in 1912 of Tarzan of the Apes, and continuing through more than two dozen science fantasies, reveals an appeal to deepseated racism in the popular imagination of early twentieth-century American culture. Interweaving the fictional fantasies of lost races like that ruled over by La of Opar (or

Atlantis) with the repeated presentation of inferior Afro-American characters and base native tribesmen in Africa, Burroughs is a key contributor to the racist mold into which the images of

Afro-Americans and black Africans were forced in American popular fiction and film.

The fullest exploration of the dark side of Burroughs' creation has come in the fiction of Tarzan's second chronicler, Philip Jose

Farmer. The darker vision of Farmer is most clearly presented in A

Feast Unknown (1969) which is as much an investigation of the

American psyche, festering at the time with a genocidal war in

Vietnam, as it is another volume of autobiography from Lord 197

Grandrith (Lord Greystoke). Most of Tarzan's audience would be very

uncomfortable if confronted with the dark archetypal structure underlying the story of the noble white savage, as Farmer shows it.

Here Grandrith (Lord Greystoke) addresses Caliban (), his half-brother:

I had always thought my attitudes towards killing was very healthy. And I'd always thought my attitude towards sex was extremely healthy. But somewhere in me was linkage between the two. Something in me equated the act of coitus with killing, the thrust of the penis with the thrust of the knife, orgasm with the bliss of the knife, as Nietzsche called it.l

A thinly written entertainment like the Tarzan series could not make such a lasting appeal to a large American audience, with its almost endless chain of violent physical struggles with beasts, monsters, and men, if there were not indeed a dark and savage imagination to be satisfied in the minds of this audience.

The discovery of a violent subconscious appeal in the Tarzan adventures would not in itself be startling if it were not closely and persistently plotted in a race-conscious setting. In fact, much of the plot movement in the series is accomplished by pitting tribe against tribe, species against species, isolated strains against each other. Though individual chieftains, princesses, and plotting traitors do emerge from among these lost, races (now found by Tarzan), the ape man's individual success against these collective forces, identified by their relative primitiveness, savagery, or degeneracy is prominent. It thus appears that

Burroughs' success in the exploits of Tarzan among lost races would 198

not have been possible if real American race hatred were not such a

prominent part of the times in which Burroughs wrote.

Tarzan rejects all constraining social orders other than that of the "law of the jungle." He is granted the status of nearly perfect white man whose rugged individualism is given free reign over an entire continent that he protects against the encroachments of civilization. Burroughs' Anglo-American audience, its supremacy as well as its reputation of superiority threatened by the furor of cultural change that Afro-American achievements were beginning to make obvious, may have found a welcome respite in escaping to

Tarzan's Dark Continent where white power was never successfully challenged. Into this continent Burroughs projected his feelings about his own dark continent of America with its racial relations to be faced daily.

The American in Tarzan's audience had only recently witnessed the exhaustion of the American frontier and the confinement of wilderness to small tracts. While only one or two generations before, Americans were experiencing regeneration by taming huge chunks of this frontier, in Edgar Rice Burroughs' era they were asking, "What do we do for an encore?" This was true, despite the feeling, acknowledged by Roderick Nash in Wilderness and the ...

American Mind (1967), that North American pioneers

feared and hated this environment. Recognizing the root of their bias, they used visual metaphors to express their feelings. The wilderness was "dark" and "gloomy" or "nightmarish." The pioneers' obsession was to clear the land, to remove the vision-obscuring trees and vines, to bring light 199

into darkness. Certainly there was an economic motive for this attitude. Religion also figured in it, since wilderness was construed by most frontiersmen to be in league with devils, demons, and the evil forces of darkness that civilization must overcome. But, I increasingly feel, the heart of the bias against wilderness was ancient association between security and sight. The American pioneer re-experienced the situation and the anxieties of early man. Neither felt at home in the wilderness.2

Appealing to a very ancient, archetypal fear, Edgar Rice Burroughs

gives the American imagination a Tarzan who does feel at home in the

wilderness. By his combination of brain and brawn, skill and

strength, heredity and environment, he conquers all in his forays

through time and space, among races frozen in time and in locations

both in and out of this world.

Tarzan capitalizes on the era's concern with the origins of

humankind by explicit and implicit references to evolution and the

precepts of Social Darwinism, and his story becomes a retelling of

the American view of progress among humankind. Evolved from ape to , signified in his dual titles, Tarzan of the Apes and Lord

Greystoke, his uniqueness is in having one foot in the primitive world and the other in the civilized. In his romantic, nineteenth-century fantasyland, his primitive heritage and his civilized values are rarely in open conflict like they are in the

America of those who have followed his adventures so devotedly.

But let Burroughs have a last few words on the subject of his fiction:

There is one thing that I would constantly impress upon the young writer--and possibly with greater reason upon the established writer--that he should not take either himself or 200

his work too seriously. Except for purposes of entertainment, I consider fiction, like drama, an absolute unessential. I would not look to any fiction writer, living or dead, for guidance upon any subject, and. therefore, if he does not entertain, he is a total loss.3

Acknowledging that it should be judged foremostly for its entertainment value, the very unconsciousness with which the Tarzan series records popular American attitudes towards racism is important in analyzing American popular culture. Burroughs is a blatant though unconscious racist who is also capable of satirizing through lost races and cultures his own and American ideas about the development and disintegration of races and cultures. Tarzan represents a rejection of twentieth-century American culture, for the values he upholds are from the nineteenth century. That a portrait of America as a Dark Continent can be drawn from the Tarzan series of Edgar Rice Burroughs suggests that Tarzan is indeed a paradoxical figure worthy of study in American popular culture. I0l

Endnotes for Chapter One

Fame, Fortune, and Fun: The Motivations for Edgar Rice

Burroughs to Write, and Write, and Write Tarzan Romances

Without the extras provided in Hein's work, there are several other strictly bibliographic works which have been of substantial aid to those interested in Burroughs' works: Bradford M. Day edited Edgar Rice Burroughs Biblio: Materials Toward a Bibliography of the Works of Edgar Rioe Burroughs (1956) and Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Bibliography (1962), and John Harwood compiled Literature of Burroughsiana (1963). ? Michael Paul Orth, "Tarzan's Revenge: A Literary Biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs" (Diss. Claremont Graduate School 1973), p. 32. Orth is contextualizing a quote from James D. Hart's The Popular Book (1950; rpt. Berkeley: University of California, 1961), p. 688. 3 Suzanne Ellery Greene, Books for Pleasure: Popular Fiction, 1914-1945 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1974), p. 162. The remainder of the information provided by Greene is equally tenuous and, at times, inaccurate. Her statement, for instance, that "formal education is both good and necessary in Tarzan of the Apes" (p. 26) misses the point of the work entirely. If anyone was ever informally educated, certainly it must be Tarzan! 4 Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 313. Tarzan of the Apes just makes the cut-off point of 750,000 copies for Alice Payne Hackett's 70 Years of Best Sellers, 1895-1965 (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1967). It is far down the list of combined hardcover and paperback sales at 1,033,525, and does not even make the list of rankings for paperbacks alone which start at one million in sales. There has been a dramatic change since 1965, however, for the Tarzan revival in paperbacks is not reflected in this edition of Hackett's computations. 5 Only two university libraries, those of the University of Wisconsin and the University of Washington, have a copy and in both cases it is in the non-lending reference section. Because of the new copyright law, I have been informed by these libraries, it cannot be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. 202

Robert Foster, Introduction, A Guide to Middle Earth (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977), n. pag. ? Orth, p. 172. g Irwin Porges, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), p. 139n. 9 Edgar Rice Burroughs, "The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw," in The Fantastic Pulps, ed. Peter Haining (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), pp. 44-61.

Henry Hardy Heins, ed., A Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs, rev. ed. (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1964), p. 42. 11 Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Outlaw of Torn (New York: Ace Books, 1973), particularly pp. 52-54. 12 Porges, p. 787. Burroughs' A was also written prior to Tarzan of the Apes. 13 Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Lost Continent (New York: Ace Books, 1973), pp. 10-11. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text.

T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men," in Collected Poems: 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. 80. 15 Porges, p. 718n. 16 Orth, pp. x-xi.

17 Robert E. Spiller, et al., Literary History of the United States: History, 4th ed. rev. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), p. 1377. Spiller, et al., may believe the figure correct, but it probably is typical of Burroughs' bent toward hyperbole. 16 "Hanging Out with the L.A. Rockers," Time, 109 (25 April 1977), 81. 19 Two excellent and lengthy bibliographies of fiction featuring Africa are in G.D. Killam's Africa in English Fiction, 1874-1939 (1968), and Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow's The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing About Africa (1970). 20 Stow Persons, American Minds: A History of Ideas (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), p. 334. 203

21 Orth, p. 285. 22 Cleanth Brooks, R.W.B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, eds., American Literature: The Makers and the Making, 1861-1914 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), p. 1634. 23 Howard Lachtman, "A Review of Earle Labor's Jack London," Jack London Newsletter (September-December 1974), p. 111. 24 Earle Labor, "Jack London, 1876-1976: A Centennial Recognition," Modem Fiction Studies, 22 (Spring 1976), 5-6. 25 Starling Price, "Jack London's America" (Diss. University of Minnesota 1967), pp. 78-79.

Brooks, Lewis, and Warren, p. 1632. 27 Bruce Kuklick, "Myth and Symbol in American Studies," American Quarterly, 24 (October 1972), 441-443. 28 Ray B. Browne, "Popular Culture and the 'New Humanities,'" ASAP Newsletter (a publication of the American Studies Association of the Philippines), 2 (April 1978), 20. 29 Porges, p. 132. 30 Porges, p. 132.

31 Rudolph Altrocchi, "Ancestors of Tarzan," Sleuthing in the Stacks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944), p. 124. 32 Porges, p. 709.

33 Porges, pp. 708-709.

34 ... Thomas Love Peacock, Melincourt or Sir Oran Haut-ton, in The Works of Thomas Love Peacock (London: Constable, 1924), II, p. 63.

June Triplett and Corey Ford, Coconut Oil: June Triplett’s Amazing Book Out of Darkest Africa! (New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1931), p. 170. 30 Triplett and Ford, p. 175.

37 . Richard A. Lupoff, Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (New York: Ace Books, 1968), p. 259. 38 ' ' Gerald Gardner and Dee Caruso, The World's Greatest Athlete (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1973), p. 55. 204

Thomas Llewellan Jones, "The Man Who Really Was . . . Tarzan," in Mother Was a Lovely Beast: A Feral Man Anthology, ed. Philip José Farmer (New York: Pyramid Books, 1976), pp. 224-234. 40 Philip Jos/ Farmer, Lord Tyger (New York: New American Library, 1972), dedication. See particularly Chapter 22, "Questions and Answers," for an imaginative conclusion to this acknowledged imitation of Tarzan. 41 Michael McCarthy, "Africa and the American West," Journal of American Studies, 11 (August 1977), 187-202. Philip Jos/ Farmer, Introductipn, Mother Was a Lovely Beast: A Feral Man Anthology, ed. Philip Jos/ Farmer (New York: Pyramid Books, 1976), p. x. 43 Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1975), p. 457. 44 Fiedler, p. 13. 45 . Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), p. 1. 46 Fairchild, p. 2.

Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin [1934]), p. 15. 48 Benedict, p. 16. 49 Orth, pp. 13-14.

50 Robert W. Rydell, "The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893: Racist Underpinnings of a Utopian Artifact," Journal of American Culture, 1 (Summer 1978), 255. 51 Rydell, p. 269. Endnotes for Chapter Two

The Tarzan Motifs and Formulas:

Indexing as a Method for Cultural Analysis

1 Other interesting manifestations of the lost race formula are found in the following Tarzan books: there is a land called Pal-ul-don in Tarzan the Terrible (1921); there is a land of giant Alali, as well as a land beyond the thickets of the pygmy Minuni, in Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924); there is an isolated medieval knighthood in the mountains, lost to the world for seven hundred years, in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (1928); there is a Rome-like empire, this one cut off for over a thousand years, in Tarzan and the Lost Empire (1929); Tarzan is in Pellucidar for Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1930); Tarzan discovers a lost race in the Ghenzi Mountains in Tarzan Triumphant (1932); a lost city, actually two cities, Athne and Cathne, are found in the lost land of Onthat in Tarzan and the City of Gold (1933); a gorilla kingdom called London on the Thames, with a King Henry the Eighth on the throne, is found in Tarzan and the Lion Man (1934); there is a lost kingdom of Alentejo, replete with castles, in Tarzan’s Quest (1936); there is a lost and forbidden city of Ashair in Tarzan and the Forbidden City (1938); and Tarzan finds a lost ancient Mayan civilization in Tarzan and the Castaways (1965). ? The lost Atlantis theme in literature is at least as old as Plato's dialogues. Its modern reincarnations are usually traced to Thomas More's utopia (1551) and Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis (1627). Utopia and Atlantis are combined in many works like Dennis Wheatley's They Found Atlantis(1936). Atlantis is used in all of the following works: Francis Ashton's Alas, That Great City (n.d.), Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues (1869), Cutliffe Hyne's The Lost Continent (1900), David MacLean Parry's The Scarlet Empire (1906), Pierre Benoit's L’Atlantide (1920), Otto Schulz's Tlavatli (ca. 1920s), Karl zu Eulenburg's Die Brunnen der Grossen Tiefe (1926), Sydney Wright's Deluge (1928) and its sequel, Dawn (1929), Arthur Conan Doyle's The Maracot Deep (1929), Lilian Elizabeth Roy's The Prince of Atlantis (1929), George C. Foster's The Lost Garden (1930), James Leslie Mitchell's Three Go Back (1932), Clara Iza von Ravn's Selector’s Men of Atlantis (1937), Marjorie Livingston's Island Sonata (1944), Daphne Viger's Atlantis Rising 206

(1944), Francis Ashton's The Breaking of the Seals (1946), Stanton Arthur 's The Sunken World (1948), Phyllis Cradock's Gateway to Remembrance (1949), and Jane Gaskell's trilogy (1963-1966): The Serpent, Atlan, and The City...... C.B. Stilson's trilogy puts Atlantean Greeks in the Antarctic: Polaris of the Snows, Minos of Sardanes, and Polaris and the Goddess Glorian (1915-1916). The Antarctic is also the setting for Atlanteans in Dennis Wheatley's They Found Atlantis (1936) and The Man Who Missed the War (1945). Atlanteans appear in South America in Miles Sheldon-Williams' The Power of Ula (1906), in Australia in Erie Cox's Out of the Silence (1925), in the Amazon in Olaf W. Anderson's The Treasure Vault of Atlantis (1925), in India in 's Jimgrim (1931), in Opar in Philip Jose Farmer's Hadon of Acient Opar (1974) and Flight to Opar (1976), as well as many of the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and, again in Africa, in George Allan England's The Flying Legion (1920). Atlantis is reconstituted in the Sargasso Sea in three works: Frank Aubrey's A Queen of Atlantis (1899), and Francis H. Sibson's The Survivors (1932) and its sequel, The Stolen Continent (1934). The Sargasso Sea is also the lost land for three non-Atlantean works: Thomas Janvier's In the Sargasso Sea (1898), 's The Boats of the Glen Carig (ca. 1900), and Just Miles Forman's [probable author] The Island of Lost Ships (ca. 1923). Alaric J. Roberts finds room in one romance for both an Atlantis and a in New Trade Winds for the Seven Seas (1942). The Pacific's equivalent to Atlantis, Lemuria is the setting for an Atlantean race in Frederick Spencer Oliver's A Dweller on (1894), G. Firth Scott's The Last Lemurian: A Westralian Romance (1898), and Richard Sharpe Shaver's I Remember Lemuria & The Return of Sathanas (1948). Mu, and island-continent in the Pacific similar to Lemuria, is the locale for at least three of James Churchwar's books--2%e Lost Continent of Mu (1926) [which includes the lost continent of Atlantis, too], The Children of Mu (1931), and The Sacred Symbols of Mu (1933)—as well as for Muriel Bruce's Mukara: A Novel (1930), Owen Rutter's The Monster of Mu (1932), Nelson S. Bond's Exiles of Time (1949), and 's The Wizard of Lemuria (1965). More Pacific island-continents provide the settings for Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (n.d.), H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), John DeMorgan's He: A Companion to She (1887), set on Easter Island, Andrew Lang's The End of Phaeacia (1887), Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Mucker (1921) and Caspak (or ) series—Land That Time Forgot (1924) and its sequels, The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time's Abyss--Duffield Osborne's The Secret of the Crater (1900), in which Phoenicians are discovered, Roy Norton's The Toll of the Sea (1909), Francis Stevens' The Unwilling Adventurer (1919), Abraham Merritt's The Moon Pool (1919), E. Charles Vivian's People of the Darkness (1924) and Field of Sleep (1925), J. Allan Dunn's The Flower of Fate (1928), and Edgar Wallace, Merian C. , and Delos W. Lovelace's King Kong (1932). 207

3 Among Haggard's other She stories which build upon the mythical Ayesha of Kor, are Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), She and Allan (1921), and Wisdom's Daughter: The Life and Love Story of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (1923). 4 R. Reginald and Douglas Menville, eds., Lost Race and Adult Fantasy Fiction [pamphlet describing this Arno Press reprint series] (New York: Arno Press, 1978), p. 3 5 H. Rider Haggard, She and King Solomon's Mines (New York: Modern Library, 1957), p. 124. g Among the better known imitation sequels which appeared in 1887 alone are Andrew Lang and Walter Herries Pollock's He, and three by John DeMorgan: He, A Companion to She, "Bess," A Companion to "Jess," and It. DeMorgan, also in 1887, published an imitation sequel to Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) called King Solomon's Treasures, and still in 1887, Henry Chartres Biron, using the pseudonym Hyder Ragged, published King Solomon's Wives; or, Mines. 7 Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folk-Tales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Medieval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends, 6 vols. (Bloomington: University Studies, 1932), I, pp. 2-3. o Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books (New York: New American Library [1961]), passim. See chapter one for an extended discussion of this issue of the origins of Tarzan. g Thomas L. Wymer has taken this concept a step further in relation to Tarzan and other characters which Farmer borrows from Edgar Rice Burroughs by projecting the trickster role onto the writer. See Wymer's "Philip Jose Farmer: The Trickster as Artist," to be published in the new volume (due September 1978) of science fiction criticism being edited by Thomas D. Clareson: volume two of Voices for the Future: Essays on Mayor Science Fiction Writers (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press). 10 Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917-1930 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970), p. 141. While the sales figures Nash cites are approximately correct for 1970, there have been a dozen or so American books which have sold far more copies than Tarzan of the Apes. 11 John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 22. Subsequent references to this work are cited 208

in the text. 12 Bruce Kuklick, "Myth and Symbol in American Studies," American Quarterly, 24 (October 1972), 435-450. 13 R. Gordon Kelly, "Literature and the Historian," American Quarterly, 26 (May 1974), 141-159. 14 , Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Land That Time Forgot (New York: Ace Books, n.d.), p. 152. 15 Byron [George Gordon], Don Juan, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 104. 18 Such parallels are deserving, of further study; for Burroughs, intentionally or unintentionally, is demonstrating a degree of literateness for which he rarely achieves recognition. There is certainly an intriguing case waiting to be made for viewing Burroughs' romantic heroes--from John Carter and David Innes to Tarzan, Lord Greystoke--as Byronic heroes.

The stereotypes of the mythical Greek and Roman gods and goddesses are also archetypes. The possible associations of Burroughs' characters in name and traits with such mythical figures is something which ought to be pursued. The names which Burroughs gives his goddesses, Nah-ee-nah the Moon Maid, for example, vaguely imply an identification with mythical types. The character traits are quite similar oftentimes, certainly, with both the mythical figures and Burroughs' characters having basic items emphasized like strength, intelligence, beauty, agility, and so forth. It often seems that Burroughs' characters are replaying the grandiose games of the gods. 18 Ray Bradbury, "Thank You, Mr. Burroughs," The [Toledo, OH] Blade Sunday Magazine (23 November 1975), p. 12. In slightly modified form, this article appears as the introduction to Irwin Porge's Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (1975). 19 J.E.A. Tyler, The Tolkien Companion, ed. S.A. Tyler (New York: Avon Books, 1977), p. 9. 20 Tyler, p. 10.

21 Henry Morton Stanley, In Darkest Africa: Or, The Quest, Rescue, and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1891), I, p. 437. 22 Stanley, I, p. 436.

23 James V. Hatch, Black Image on the American Stage: A 209

Bibliography of Plays and Musicals, 1770-1970 (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1970), pp. 25, 30, and 50. 24 Eugene G. O'Neill, The Emperor Jones, in The Emperor Jones, Dif'freni, The Straw (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), p. 179. 25 O'Neill, p. 194. or Vachel Lindsay, "The Congo" and Other Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1914), p. 6. 27 Lindsay, p. 6. TlO

Endnotes for Chapter Three

Edgar Rice Burroughs:

Science Fantasist and Science Fiction Writer

Tarzan at the Earth’s Core is the fourteenth in the Tarzan series, if The Tarzan Twins (1927) is included; it is the thirteenth in Ballantine Books' Tarzan series, however, since Ballantine does not reprint The Tarzan Twins. 2 Irwin Porges, Edgar Rioe Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), pp. 787-796. 3 As with the Tarzan series, incidentally, to which Fritz Leiber was authorized to add Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966), Burroughs' Pellucidar series was added to by the authorized edition of Mahars of Pellucidar (1976) by . 4 R. Reginald and Douglas Menville, eds., Lost Race and Adult Fantasy Fiction [pamphlet describing this Arno Press reprint series] (New York: Arno Press, 1978), p. 4. c Michael Paul Orth, "Tarzan's Revenge: A Literary Biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs" (Diss. Claremont Graduate School 1973), p. 119.

Samuel Moskowitz, ed., Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (New York: Holt, 1970), p. 335. ? Claiming, after Peary's triumph in 1909, that he had reached the North Pole in 1908, Frederick Albert Cook enjoyed some celebrity before his claim was discredited. o Avram Davidson, Foreword, The Island Under the Earth (New York: Ace Books, 1969), pp. 5-7. Q With the exception of the elements concerned with the inner earth setting, Inez Haynes Gillmore's Angel Island (1914) retold Paltock's story for the same generation which read Burroughs' early works. 211

L. Sprague de Camp and Willy Ley, (New York: Rinehart, 1952), passim.

J[ames] 0[sler] Bailey, Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction (New York: Argus Books, 1947), particularly pp. 40-44. Bailey's case is not watertight, however, and further investigation of the subject may well alter the opinions expressed in the text of this dissertation. 12 John Cleves Symmes, Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820), by Captain Adam Seaborn, Pseudonym of John Cleves Symmes, ed. J[ames] 0[sler] Bailey (Gainesville, FL: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1965). 13 Franklin Walker, The Seacoast of Bohemia, rev. and enl. ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Peregrine Smith, 1973), p. 44. 14 Jules Verne took Poe's Pym away from Symzonia, instead of into it, in The Mystery of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne, edited by Basil Ashmore. Verne's contribution, apparently is The Sphinx of the Ice Fields which Ashmore coupled with Poe’s narrative. 15 Thomas D. Clareson, "Lost Lands, Lost Races: A Pagan Princess of Their Very Own,: in Many Futures, Many Worlds: Theme and Form in Science Fiction, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1977), pp. 119-120. 1 In addition to those works including both a polar and inner earth setting, there is a cavern locale for John Uri Lloyd's Etidorpha (1895), and ancients in an inner earth locale in Charles Willing Beale's The Secret of the Earth (1899). The anonymous Land of the Central Sun (1902-1903) has a Pellucidar-1 ike setting, as does Frank Stockton's The Great Stone of Sardis (1908). Roy Rockwood (pseudonym for Edward Stratemeyer) published a book with the suggestive title of Five Thousand Miles Underground (1908). There is a subterranean locale for Persians in Ludwig Lewisohn's The Cave of Glittering Lamps (1910-1911), and a subterranean setting beneath the Andes for Peruvian Incas in Rex T. Stout's Under the Andes (1914). Abraham Merritt uses an inner earth locale beneath the Pacific in The Moon Pool (1919), Victor Rousseau locates Atlanteans in a hollow earth in The Eye of Balamok (1920) and, in more recent times, Avram Davidson uses an inner earth locale in his Island Under the Earth (1969), and John Eric Holmes uses Burroughs' inner world of Pellucidar in Mahars of Pellucidar (1976). Other locales for lost race romances include Gonwonaland in A.E. Van Vogt's Book of Ptath (n.d.), Tartars in Borneo in Patrick and Terence Casey's The Story of William Hyde (1915-1916), Arabia in Robert Ames Bennet's The Bowl of Baal (1916), Egyptians in Tibet in 212

L. Moresby's The Glory of : A Romance (1926), Tibet again in 's Lost Horizon (1933), the Himalayas in Alexander Craig's Ionia: Land of Wise Men and Eair Women (1898), India in Ganpat's Mirror of Dreams (1928), the Gobi Desert in Mongolia in both 's Marching Sands (1920) and Perley Poore Sheehan's The Abyss of Wonders (1915), and Cambodia in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Jungle Girl (1931). Swinging to the Western Hemisphere, there are lost race, romances which include lost Englishmen in South America in Henry Sinclair Drayton's In Oudemon (1901) and lost Frenchmen and lost Englishmen in the Caribbean in John Reed Scott's The Duke of Oblivion (1914). Mount Roraima in Venezuela is used in both Frank Aubrey's The Devil-Tree of El Dorado (1897) and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912). The Incas are present in Clifford Smyth's The Gilded Man (1918) and Fritz Leiber's Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966). Abraham Merritt also used the Andes in The Face of the Abyss (1931). The Mayans are found in T.A. Willard's The wizard of Zacna: A Lost City of the Mayas (1935), while the Aztecs carry on in Francis Stevens' The Citadel of Fear (1918) and Thomas Allibone Janvier's The Aztec Treasure House (1890). Burroughs also made use of these Central and South African survivors in some of the Tarzan books, and Tarzan's escarpment domain in Africa is a setting similar to Aubrey and Doyle's Roraima plateau. To wrap up this spot check of favorite locales for lost race romances there are enigmatic works like Lewis Carroll's "underground" fantasies, Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872), futuristic underground cultures in H.M. Egbert's The Draft of Eternity (1918) and Thea von Harbou's Metropolis (1927), Ys on a lost continent in Abraham Merritt's fantasy, Creep, Shadow (n.d.), a subatomic world of in Ray Cummings' The Girl in the Golden Atom (1923), ancient civilizations in Sydney Fowler Wright's Island of Captain Sparrow (n.d.) and The Vengeance of Gwa (n.d.), and yet another ancient civilization in Pierrepont B. Noye's Pallid Giant (1927). !? Reminiscences of Walt Disney World and Disneyland are based on recent visits to both parks. 18 Margaret J. King, "Popular Culture in Cross-Cultural Perspective," in Topics in Culture Learning, vol. 5, ed. Richard W. Brislin and Michael P. Hammett (, HI: East West Center, 1977), p. 85. 19 Michael Woods, "'Negative Science' Assailed: Amateurs Sometimes Right," Toledo [Ohio] Blade (10 July 1977), pp. 1 and 4. 20 There is a similar appeal in the comfortable but primitive life of Tarzan and Jane's treehouse home--as portrayed in the Tarzan films, but not in the books--and the Robinson Family's treehouse. 213

Reginald and Menville, p. 18. 22 Perhaps intentionally, the emphasis is on the tiger, too, in Otis Adelbert Kline's Tam, Son of The Tiger (1962), an imitation Burroughs which has elements of both Tarzan and Pellucidar, according to Richard A. Lupoff, Edgar Rioe Burroughs: Master of Adventure (New York: Ace Books, 1968), p. 260. 23 The point being made here concerns the standards used in censorship and not a position on whether or not censorship should be employed in regard to Burroughs' books. 24 Raymond Bernard, The Hollow Earth: The Greatest Geographical Discovery in History: Made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd in the Mysterious Land Beyond the Poles—the True Origin of Flying Saucers (New York: Fieldcrest, 1964), p. ix. Bernard's "revolutionary theory of the earth's structure" is clearly based on the Symmes theory, and possibly others, though Bernard researched the theory only as far back as 1906, the year the authoritative Phantom of the Poles was published by William Reed (pp. xi and 17). Willis George Emerson's The Smoky God (1908), the story of Olaf Jansen at the inner earth, is cited as an early authentic work (p. 15). Bernard again shows his dearth of knowledge about pre-twentieth-century evidence which this chapter suggests is just as authentic as is Bernard's concerning the nature of the inner earth. 25 Michael Marsden, "Introduction to Popular Culture" Course, Bowling Green State University (Fall 1977). •ZA4

Endnotes for Chapter Four

The "White Ape Myth" and Tarzan

This crisis is also reflected in the thoughtful titles and themes of more modern novels like The Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph , The Outsider (1953) by Richard Wright, and The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) by John A. Williams. 2 . Daniel J. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade: The Blaek Experience in Motion Pictures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 16. 3 Leab, p. 16.

4 Leab, p. 20. 5 Leon Reisman, "Cinema Technique and Mass Culture," American Quarterly, 1 (Winter 1949), 314. g Ray Lee and Vernell Coriell, A Pictorial History of the Tarzan Movies (Los Angeles: Golden State News, 1966), includes (p. 8) the inaccurate citation of Elmo Lincoln as White Arm Joe, the Blacksmith in Birth of a Nation', actually, these are two roles: Lincoln plays White Arm Joe, but Wally Reid plays the Blacksmith. ? Will Wright, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 16. 8 Copies of Hollywood Film Enterprises' 8mm version of Tarzan of the Apes are available for purchase at about $60. There was one earlier film based on a work by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Tarzan-like The Lad and the Lion (1917) which did not make a significant impact on movie-goers. Other non-Tarzan films based on Burroughs' works are The Lion Man (1936), At the Earth's Core (1976), and The Land That Time Forgot (1976). g Robert W. Fenton, The Big Swingers (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 87. Also Lee and Coriell, p. 10. 10 NYTFR (28 ; 13:2).

11 The first Tarzan was actually Winslow Wilson who joined the war-time army just before production began. Otto Linkenhelt (Elmo 215

Lincoln) was his replacement. 12 Fenton, photograph of advertisement following p. 70. 13 Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, n.d.), p. 290. 14 Kalton C. Lahue, ed., Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1973), p. 52. 15 Some White Hope is a precursor to the appearance of James Earl Jones in the Jack Johnson story, The Great White Hope (1970). Jones' father was also an actor and a prize-fighter, coincidentally. 16 Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 9. 3? Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Films, 1900-1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 127. 18 Leab, p. 22.

19 Randall Adams, "The Exorcist as a Popular Culture Artifact," paper presented and distributed at the Western Regional Popular Culture Association Meeting, California State Polytechnic Institute, 1 February 1975, p. 2. The terminology is adapted from Randall's paper. 20 Francis Ward, "Black Male Images in Film," Freedomways, 14 (1974), 223.

21 Nelson Manfred Blake, A History of American Life and Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), p. 579. 22 Peter Noble, The Negro in Films (London: Skelton Robinson, n.d.), p. 148.

23 Edward Mapp, Blacks in American Films: Today and Yesterday (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972), p. 252. 24 Bogle, pp. 147, 185, and 168 respectively. 25 James P. Murray, To Find an Image: Black Films from Uncle Tom to Super Fly (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), pp. 25 and 44. 28 Murray, p. 17.

27 ■ Ilene Rosembaum [pseud. Eileen Landay], Black Film Stars (New 216

York: Drake, 1973), p. 29. 28 Jim Pines, Blacks in Films: A Survey of Facial Themes and Images in the American Film (London: Studio Vista, 1974), p. 77. 29 Pines, p. 131. 30 Leab, p. 136.

31 Cripps, p. 124.

32 Alfred E. Opubur and Adebayo Ogunbi, "Ooga Booga: The African Image in American Films," in Other Voices, Other Views: An International Collection of Essays from the Bicentennial, ed. W. Winks (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 344. Endnotes for Chapter Five

Tarzan and the Ku Klux Kian:

Anglo-Americanism in the Twenties

Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, n.d.). Illustrated with scenes from the photo-play, Birth of a Nation. 2 The Crisis, 10 (May 1915), 33. 3 John W. Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1 1866-1876 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902), p. 245. Other prominent racist historians of the era who held views similar to those of Burgess and Wilson are James Ford Rhodes in History of the United States (1906), and William A. Dunning in Reconstruction: Political and Economic, 1865-1877 (1907). 4 Woodrow Wilson, "The Reconstruction of the Southern States," Atlantic Monthly, 87 (January 1901), 6. 5 The third romance in Dixon's "Southern Trilogy"—all three of which were written in response to the still popular Uncle Tom's Cabin (1859) by Harriet Beecher Stowe—is The Traitor (1907). 6 William Joseph Simmons, The Kian Unmasked (Atlanta: William E. Thompson, 1923), p. 148. 7 Charles D. Johnson, "How Much Is the Migration a Flight from Persecution?" Opportunity, 1 (September 1923), 273. g Interestingly, 1921 to 1926 is the period in the twenties when no Tarzan films were made! The pre-sound era Tarzans and Tarzan films include Elmo Lincoln as Tarzan in Tarzan of the Apes (1918) and its sequel, Romance of Tarzan (1918), as well as in The Adventures of Tarzan (1920 serial/1928 feature). Gene Polar is Tarzan in The Return of Tarzan (1920; later retitled The Revenge of Tarzan), P. Dempsey Tabler is Tarzan and Kamuela C. Searle is Korak in The Son of Tarzan (1920 serial), James H. Pierce is Tarzan in Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1927), and is Tarzan in both (1928 serial) and (1929 serial; included some sound segments). Gordon Griffith plays the young Tarzan in Tarzan of the Apes (1918) and the young Korak in The 218

Son of Tarzan (1920). Johnny Weissmuller is the star of the first all-sound Tarzan film, Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932). 9 Vance Kepley, Jr., "The Film Medium as History: The Social and Political Implications of D.W. Griffith's The Birth fop a Nation" (Senior Thesis in History, University of Illinois, May 1973), appendices. The letter is in the D.W. Griffith Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. 10 "Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Kian," 100% Americans with orchestra accompaniment (Indianapolis: Ku Klux Kian Label, n.d.). H Irwin Porges, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), p. 505. 12 Porges, p. 529.

13 Gordon Mills, "Jack London's Quest for Salvation," American Quarterly, 7 (Spring 1955), 4. 14 Joseph Noel, Footloose in Arcadia: A Personal Record of Jack London, George Sterling, Ambrose Bierce (New York: Carrick and , 1940), p. 85. 15 These images of blacks are still being projected, at least from the radical right of the American political spectrum. White Power, the National Socialist White Peoples Party's "newspaper of white revolution," carries a regular column similar to that which the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples' The Crisis carried on lynchings. This "Casualty Report" details the atrocities of coons and niggers as well as niggerlets, monkoids, apes and jungle bunnies. White Power, no. 42 (August 1973), p. 8. 16 David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Kian, 1865-1965 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), p. 1.

Simmons, pp. 176-177. 18 "Come Join the Ku Klux Kian in the Old Town Tonight," baritone with orchestra accompaniment (Indianapolis: Ku Klux Kian Label, n.d.). 19 What an anomaly in Tarzan's character that he can only express surprise at the changes in finicky Jane! Many the red-blooded reader who has thought Tarzan should have taken some of those decisive actions for which he normally earns his keep as a hero; surely a tigress is a fit match for the King of Beasts! 219

Unlike Buck's satisfactory response to the "call of the wild," the phrase Jack London used to title his most famous work, Jane musters only a glimpse of what it could mean to yield to the "call of the primitive," which is the title of this chapter of Burroughs' most famous work. 20 Edgar Rice Burroughs differentiates races to a far greater extent. In his caste system there is, for instance, as great a differential between the apes and gorillas as between the whites and blacks. 21 . Roderick Nashj The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917-1920 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970), pp. 144-145. 22 Nash, Nervous, passim. 23 Much like the updated Emersonian metaphor, "things are in the saddle and ride mankind," which inspired the title of Harry Russell Huebel's popular culture reader: Things in the Driver's Seat (1972). 24 Porges, p. 745n. 25 Fenton, photograph following p..7O., 26 Fenton, photograph following p. 70. A shorter version of the Tarzan Code is reprinted in Porges (p. 277): A Tarzan Tribesman will always be truthful, honest, manly and courageous. He will obey the laws of health and cleanliness. He will smile in defeat and will be modest in victory. He will do unto others as he would have others do unto him. 27 Roderick Nash, "The American Cult of the Primitive," American Quarterly, 18 (Fall 1966), 523. 28 E.E. Reynolds, Baden-Powell: A Biography of Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), pp. 177-178. 29 Porges, pp. 454 and 758n. 3D Porges, p. 502. 31 Porges, p. 506.

32 Henry Hardy Heins, ed., A Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs, rev. ed. (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1964), p. 92. 220

Heins, p. 92. 34 Porges, p. 607. 35 Heins, p. 90.

36 Heins, p. 90.

37 Porges, p. 607.

38 Col. Winfield Jones, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (n.p., n.d.), p. 231. Endnotes for Chapter Six

America, the Dark Continent

1 Philip Jose Farmer, (N.p.: Fokker D-LXIX Press, 1975), p. 260. 2 . Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Press, 1975), pp. x-xi. 3 . Henry Hardy Heins, ed., A Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs, rev. ed. (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1964), p. 26. Heins has reprinted this article, titled "Entertainment is Fiction's Purpose," from the June 1930 issue of Writer's Digest. . „ Works Consulted

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Alger, Horatio, Jr. Ragged Dick and Mark, the Match Boy. New York: Collier Books, 1973.

Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautiful Ones Are Hot Yet Born. Introd. Christina Ama Ata Aidoo. New York: Collier Books, 1973.

Bannerman, Helen. The Story of Little Black Sambo. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, n.d. .

Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Airmont, 1965.

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko: Or The Royal Slave. In Oroonoko and Other Prose Narratives. Ed. Montaque Summers. N.p.: B. Blom, 1967.

Bierce, Ambrose. The Devil’s Dictionary. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.

Boulle, Pierre. . Trans. Xan Fielding. New York: New American Library, 1964.

Buchan, John. Prester John. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. Vril: The Power of the Coming Race. New York: Rudolf Steiner, 1972.

Burroughs, Edgar Rice. At the Earth’s Core. New York: Ace Books, n.d. . New York: Ace Books, n.d.

. The Beasts of Tarzan. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977

. The Cave Girl. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

. The Eternal Savage. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

. Jungle Tales of Tarzan. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.

. The Lad and the Lion. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

The Land of Hidden Men. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

Land of Terror. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

The Land that Time Forgot. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

The Lost Continent. New York: Ace Books, 1973.

The Mad King. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

The Moon Maid. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

The Mucker. New York: Ace Books, 1974.

The Outlaw of Tom. New York: Ace Books, 1973.

Pellucidar. New York: Ace Books, 1972.

The Return of Tarzan. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976

The Return of the Mucker. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

Savage Pellucidar. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

The Son of Tarzan. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977.

Tanar of Pellucidar. New York: Ace Books, 1973.

Tarzan and the Ant Men. New York: Ballantine Books, 1974.’

Tarzan and the Castaways. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975. ’

Tarzan and the City of Gold. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975. 224

Tarzan and the City of Gold. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

------. Tarzan and the Forbidden City. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977.

------. Tarzan and "The Foreign Legion." New York: Ballantine Books, 1975.

------. Tarzan and the Golden Lion. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.

------. Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.

------. Tarzan and the Leopard Men. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975.

------. Tarzan and the Lion Man. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975.

------. Tarzan and the Lost Empire. New York: Ballantine Books, 1974.

------. Tarzan and the Lost Empire. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

------. Tarzan and the Madman. New York: Ballantine Books, 1974.

------. Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975.

------. Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. New York: Ace Books, n.d.

Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle. New York: Ballantine Books, 1974.

Tarzan of the Apes. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975.

Tarzan the Invincible. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975.

Tarzan the Magnificent. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975.

Tarzan the Terrible. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.

Tarzan the Untamed. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.

Tarzan Triumphant. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975. 225

------. Tarzan's Quest. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977.

------. qrfoe war chief. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973.

Butler, Samuel. Erewhon. New York: Airmont, 1967.

Byron [George Gordon]. Don Juan. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer. New York: New American Library, 1950.

------. Lord Jim. Thomas Moser and Norman Sherry, eds. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968.

Cowley, Malcolm. Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. New York: Viking Press, 1973. DadiZ, Bernard B. Climbie. Trans. Karen C. . London: Heinemann, 1971.

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Dixon, Thomas. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Kian. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, n.d.

Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime. New York: Bantam Books, 1976.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Lost World. New York: Berkley Medallion Book, 1965.

DuBois, W.E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: New American Library, 1969.

Edson, J.T. . New York: Daw Books, 1976.

Eliot. T.S. Collected Poems: 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World [1963]. Farmer, Philip JosZ. Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life as the Archangel of Technopolis and Exotica, as the Golden-eyed Hero of 181 Supersagas, as the Bronze Knight of the Running Board, Including His Final Battle Against the Forces of Hell Itself. Rev. and enl. ed. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.

———. & Feast Unknown. N.p.: Fokker D-LXIX Press, 1975.

------. Flight to Opar. New York: Daw Books, 1976. 226

------. Radon of Ancient Opar. New York: Daw Books, 1974.

------. Lord of the Trees and The Mad Goblin. New York: Ace Books, 1970.

------. Lord Tyger. New York: New American Library, 1972.

------. Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Bord Greystoke. New York: Popular Library, 1976.

Gardner, Gerald, and Dee Caruso. The World's Greatest Athlete. New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1973.

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. New York: Capricorn Books, 1959.

Greene, Graham. The Heart of the Matter. New York: Viking Press, 1948.

Haggard, H. Rider. The People of the Mist. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977.

She and King Solomon's Mines. New York: Modern Library, 1957.

Hilton, James. Lost Horizon. New York: Pockett Books, 1967.

Holmes, John Eric. Mahars of Pellucidar. New York: Ace Books, 1976.

Howells, William Dean. A Traveler from Altruria. New York: Sagamore Press, 1957.

Huxley, Aldous. Ape and Essence. New York: Bantam Books, 1958.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960.

Kane, Cheikh Hamidou. Ambiguous Adventure. Trans. Katherine Woods. New York: Collier Books, 1971.

Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Books. New York: New American Library [1961].

Leiber, Fritz. Tarzan and the Valley of Gold. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966.

Lindsay, Vachel. "The Congo" and Other Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1914. 227

Mass Violence in America: Hearings on the Ku Klux Kian, 1921. Government Printing Office, 1921; rpt. New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1969.

Melville, Herman. Hilly Budd and Other Tales. New York: New American Library, 1964.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Introd. Jean-Paul Sartre. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.

Merritt, A. The Ship of Ishtar. New York: Avon Books, 1966.

Ortega Y Gasset, Jose. The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W.W. Norton, 1932.

O'Neill, Eugene G. The Emperor Jones. In The Emperor Jones, Dif’frent, The Straw. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921, pp. 143-197.

Paltock, Robert. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins: A Cornish Man. Westport, CT: Press, 1974.

Peacock, Thomas Love. Melincourt or Sir Oran Haut-ton. In The Works of Thomas Love Peacock. Vol. II. London: Constable, 1924.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of A[rthur] Gordon Pym. In Arthur Gordon Pym, Benito Cereno, and Related Writings. Ed. John Seelye. New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1967, pp. 15-187.

------. Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Harold Beaver. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1976.

Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders [The Kemer Report). New York: Bantam Books, 1968.

Sembene, Ousmane. God's Bits of Wood. Trans. Francis Price. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.

Senghor, Leopold Seclar. Prose and Poetry. Trans. John Reed and Clive Wake. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. Tucker Brooke and Lawrence Mason, eds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein: Or The Modem Prometheus. New York: Collier Books, 1973. 228

Stanley, Henry Morton. In Darkest Africa: Or, The Quest, Rescue, and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1891.

Through the Dark Continent: Or, The Sources of the Nile Around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1878.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966.

Symmes, John Cleves. Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820), By Captain Adam Seaborn, Pseudonym of John Cleves Symmes. Ed. J.O. Bailey. Gainesville, FL: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1965.

Taylor, Harry H. The Man Who Tried Out for Tarzan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

Triplett, June, and Corey Ford. Coconut Oil: June Triplett's Amazing Book Out of Darkest Africa! New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1931.

Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.

Verne, Jules. Around the World in Eiqhty Days. New York: Lancer Books, 1968.

------. /[ Journey to the Center of the Earth. New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1967.

The Mysterious Island. Abridged ed. New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1962.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. London: Collier Books, 1969.

Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. New York: Dell, 1975.

Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr. Moreau. New York: Berkley Highland Book, 1964.

------. . New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1968.

William, Charles. Narratives and Adventures of Travellers in Africa. London: Ward and Lock, 1859. 229

Wister, Owen. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. New York: Airmont, 1964.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper and Row, 1940.

------. TRe outsider. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Wyss, Johann. The Swiss Family Robinson. New York: Airmont, 1963.

X, Malcolm, and Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1966. 230

Primary Works: Films

At the Earth's Core (1976).

Battle of Algiers, The (1966). Italian.'

Birth of a Nation, The (1915). ) Silent.

Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed (1965).

Black Legion (1937).

Black Like Me (1964).

Deep, The (1976).

Gone with the Wind (1939).

Great White Hope, The (1970).

Jaws (1975).

Land That Time Forgot, The (1976).

Lifeboat (1943).

Malcolm X (1973).

Star Wars (1977).

Tarzan and His Mate (MGM; 1934).

Tarzan and the (RKO Radio; 1945).

Tarzan and the Huntress (RKO Radio; 1947).

Tarzan and the Mermaids (RKO Radio; 1948).

Tarzan and the Slave Girl (RKO Radio; 1950).

Tarzan and the Trappers (1958; 1966).

Tarzan Escapes (MGM; 1936). 231

Tarzan Finds a Son (MGM; 1939).

Tarzan of the Apes .(1918). Silent.*

Tarzan's Secret Treasure (MGM; 1941).

Three Musketeers, The (1975).

Triumph of the Will (1934). German. 232

Primary Works: Other Media

Achebe, Chinua. "The African Image in the West." Talk at Bowling Green State University. Spring 1976.

"Come Join the Ku Klux Kian in the Old Town Tonight." Baritone with orchestra accompaniment. Indianapolis, IN: Ku Klux Kian Label, n.d.; ca. early 1920s.

"Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Kian." 100% Americans with orchestra accompaniment. Indianapolis, IN: Ku Klux Kian Label, n.d.; ca. early 1920s.

Kerbel, Michael, and Robert Edelstein, eds. Macmillan Audio Brandon Films: 16mm Collection of International Cinema, 1974-1975. Los Angeles: n.p., 1973.

"The Klansman's Friend." W.R. Rineharte accompanied by piano and 100% Americans. Indianapolis, IN: Ku Klux Kian, n.d.; ca. early 1920s.

Konyate, Secretary General of the Ligue de Defense de la Race Negre. Letter to W.E.B. DuBois. 29 April 1929. From collection of Professor Charles Cutter. San Diego State University.

Rabkin, Eric S. "The Fantastic in Literature." A presentation at Bowling Green State University. 6 July 1977.

Soyinka, Wole. Talk at San Diego State University. 14 April 1975.

Wilson, Ray (Local Chairman, National Socialist White Peoples Party) and Carroll Waymon (Afro-American Professor of Education). Interviews and debate before Paul Vanderwood's "History Through Film" class. San Diego State University. 10 October 1973. 233

Secondary Works: Books

Achebe, Chinua. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1976.

Aldiss, Brian, ed. Science Fiction Art. New York: Crown, 1975.

Allan, L. David. Science Fiction Reader's Guide. Lincoln, NB: Centennial Press, 1974.

Bailey, J[ames] 0[sler]. Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction. New York: Argus Books, 1947.

Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dell Books, 1963.

------. Notes of a Native Son. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

Baishofer, Fred J., and Arthur C. Miller. One Reel a Week. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Barron, Neil, ed. Anatomy of Wonder: Science Fiction. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1976.

Barry, Iris. D. W. Griffith: American Film Master. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965.

Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin [1934].

Bernard, Raymond. The Hollow Earth: The Greatest Geographical Discovery in History: Made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd in the Mysterious Land Beyond the Poles—the True Origin of Flying Saucers. New York: Fieldcrest, 1964.

Blake, Nelson Manfred. A History of American Thought and Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963.

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Viking Press, 1973. 234

Boller, Paul F., Jr. American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865-1900. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969.

Brisbane, Robert H. The Black Vanguard: Origins of the Negro Social Revolution, 1900-1960. Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1970.

Brown, Karl. Adventures with D.W. Griffith. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.

Brunvand, Jan Harold. Folklore: A Study and Research Guide. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976.

Burgess, John W. Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866-1876. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902.

Butcher, Margaret Just, and Alain Locke. The Negro in American Culture. Rev. ed. New York: New American Library [1971].

Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By. New York: Bantam Books, 1973.

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

■------.------, Apostles of the Self-Made Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Kian, 1865-1965. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965.

Cohen, Morton M. Rider Haggard: His Life and Works. New York: Walker, 1961.

Coombs, Norman. The Black Experience in America. New York: Twayne, 1972.

Cottrell, Leonard. Lost Cities. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961.

Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Films, 1900-1942. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Dahrendorf, Ralf. Essays in the Theory of Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968.

Davidson, Basil. The Lost Cities of Africa. Rev. ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. 235

Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969.

Day, Bradford M. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Bibliography. New York: Science-Fiction and Fantasy Publications, 1962.

Day, Bradford M., ed. Edgar Rice Burroughs Biblio: Materials Toward a Bibliography of the Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. New York: Science-Fiction and Fantasy Publications, 1956. de Camp, L. Sprague. Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy. Sauk, WI: , 1976.

Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science and Literature. Rev. ed. New York: Dover, 1970.

------5 and willy Ley. Lands Beyond. New York: Rinehart, 1952.

Dunning, William Archibald. Reconstruction: Political and Economic, 1865-1877. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907.

Dykes, Eva B. The Negro in English Romantic Thought. Washington, DC: Associated, 1942.

Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1963.

Essoe, Gabe. Tarzan of the Movies: A Pictorial History of More Than Fifty Years of Edqar Rice Burroughs' Leqendary Hero. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1973.

Everson, William K. The Films of Hal Roach. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971.

Ewen, David. Panorama of American Popular Music. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

Factor, Robert L. The Black Response to America: Men, Ideals, and Organizations from Frederick Douglass to the NAACP. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1970.

Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism. New York: Russell and Russell, 1961.

Fell, John L. Film and the Narrative Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974.

Fenton, Robert W. The Big Swingers. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967. 236

Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1975.

Foner, Jack D. Blacks and the Military in American History: A New Perspective. New York: Praeger, 1974.

Foster, Robert. A Guide to Middle Earth. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977.

Franklin, Howard Bruce. Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Abridged ed. New York: Macmillan, 1951.

Freidel, Frank. America in the Twentieth Century. 4th ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.

Galanopoulos, A.G., and Edward Bacon. Atlantis: The Truth Behind the Legend. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Great Crash: 1929. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

Giannetti, Louis D. Understanding Movies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Goul art, Ron. An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines. New York: Ace Books, 1973.

Greene, Suzanne Ellery. Books for Pleasure: Popular Fiction, 1914-1945. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1974.

Griffith, Richard, and Arthur Mayer. The Movies. Rev. ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

Gunn, James. Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Gurko, Leo. Heroes, Highbrows and the Popular Mind. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953.

Hackett, Alice Payne. Seventy Years of Best Sellers, 1895-1965. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1967.

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. New York: New American Library, n.d. 237

Hammond, Dorothy, and Alta Jablow. The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing About Africa. New York: Twayne, 1970.

Harris, Joseph E. Africans and Their History. New York: New American Library, 1972.

Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Baltimore: Penguin, 1974.

Hatch, James V. Black Image on the American Stage: A Bibliography of Plays and Musicals, 1770-1970. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1970.

Heins, Henry Hardy, ed. A Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Rev. ed. West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1964.

Henderson, Robert M. D.W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.

Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage Books, 1963.

The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.

Social Darwinism in American Thought. Rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

Jackson, Kenneth T. The Ku Klux Kian in the City, 1915-1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Jacobs, Lewis. The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History. New York: Teachers College Press, 1968.

Jarvie, I.C. Movies and Society. New York: Basic Books, 1970.

Jerome, V.J. The Negro in Hollywood Films. New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1952.

Johnson, Lemuel A. The Devil, the Gargoyle, and the Buffoon. Port Washington, NY: National University Publications, 1969.

Jones, Eldred. Othello's Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Jones, Winfield. Knights of the Ku Klux Kian. N.p., n.d. [Probably a Klan-sponsored publication issued in the mid-twenties.] 238

Ketterer, David. New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974.

Katz, John Stuart, Curt Oliver, and Forbes Aird. A Curriculum in Film. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1972.

Kill am, G.D. Africa in English Fiction, 1874-1939. Ibadan [Nigeria]: Ibadan University Press, 1968.

Kovel, Joel K. White Racism: A Psychohistory. New York: Pantheon, 1970. z . y Lacy, Dan. The White Use of Blacks in America. New York: Atheneum, 1972.

Leab, Daniel J. From Sccmbo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

Lee, Ray, and Vernell Coriell. A Pictorial History of the Tarzan Movies. Los Angeles: Golden State News, 1966.

Lee, Raymond. Not So Dumb: The Life and Times of the Animal Actors. New York: Castle Books, 1970.

Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.

Lindsay, Nicholas Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: Macmillan, 1922.

Lupoff, Richard A. Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. New York: Ace Books, 1968.

Manchester, William. The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972. Boston: Little, Brown, 1944.

Mapp, Edward. Blacks in American Films: Today and Yesterday. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972.

May, Henry F. The End of American Innocence: A Study in the First Years of Our Own Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Tradition in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. 239

Maynard, Richard A. The Black Man on Film: Racial Stereotyping. Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1974.

McCullough, Norman Verrle. The Negro in English Literature: A Critical Introduction. Ilfracombe [England]: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1962.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.

Mellen, Joan. Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film. New York: Horizon, 1973.

Mott, Frank Luther. Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1947.

Murray, James P To Find an Image: Black Films from Uncle Tom to Super Fly. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973.

Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modem Democracy. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Nash, Roderick. The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917-1920. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970.

—■— ------. Wilderness and the American Mind. Rev. ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975.

National Council of Public Morals. The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities. 1917; rpt. New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1970.

Newby, I.A. Jim Crow's Defense: Anti-Negro Thought in America, 1900-1930. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968..

Ni ver, Kemp R. D.W. Griffith's The Battle at Elderberry Gulch. Ed. Bebe Bergsten. Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1972.

Noble, David W. The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden: The Central Myth in the American Novel Since 1830. New York: George Brazil 1er, 1968.

-—-—-. The Progressive Mind, 1890-1917. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971.

Noble, Peter. The Negro in Films. London: Skelton Robinson, n.d.

Noel, Joseph. Footloose in Arcadia: A Personal Record of Jack London, George Sterling, Ambrose Bierce. New York: Carrick and Evans, 1940. 240

Nye, Russell. The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America. New York: Dial Press, 1970.

O'Dell, Paul. Griffith and the Rise of Hollywood. New York: International Film Guide Series, 1970.

Okoye, Felix N. The American Image of Africa: Myth and Reality. Buffalo, NY: Black Academy Press, 1971.

O'Leary, Liam. The Silent Cinema. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1965.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1958.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.

Persons, Stow. American Minds: A History of Ideas. New York: Henry Holt, 1958.

Pines, Jim. Blacks in Films: A Survey of Racial Themes and Images in the American Film. London: Studio Vista, 1974.

Porges, Irwin. Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975.

Potter, David M. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Powers, Anne, ed. Blacks in American Movies: A Selected Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1974.

Randal, William Peirce. The Ku Klux Kian: A Century of Infamy. Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965.

Reginald, R., and Douglas Manville, eds. Lost Raee and Adult Fantasy Fiction [pamphlet describing this Arno Press reprint series]. New York: Arno Press, 1978.

Reynolds, E.E. Baden-Powell: A Biography of Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell. London: Oxford University Press, 1943.

Robinson, Ronald, and John Gallagher, with Alice Denny. Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961.

Rosembaum, Ilene [pseud. Eileen Landay]. Black Film Stars. New York: Drake, 1973. 241

Rosen, Marjorie. Popcorn Venus. New York: Avon Books, 1974.

Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953.

Roy, John Flint. A Guide to Barsoom: Eleven Sections of References in One Volume Dealing with the Martian Stories Written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.

Sampson, Harry T. Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977.

Scholes, Robert, and Eric S. Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Schreffler, Philip A. The H.P. Lovecraft Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977.

Scott, Emmett J., and Lyman Beecher Stowe. Booker T. Washington: Builder of a Civilization. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1916.

Simmons, William Joseph. The Kian Unmasked. Atlanta: William E. Thompson, 1923.

Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.

Slater, Philip E. The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.

Sloan, Irving J. The American Negro: A Chronology and Fact Book. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana, 1965.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. New York: Vintage Books, 1957.

Snowden, Frank M., Jr. Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Sochen, June. The Unbridgeable Gap: Blacks and Their Quest for the American Dream, 1900-1930. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972.

Spiller, Robert E., et al. Literary History of the United States: History. 4th ed. rev. New York: Macmillan, 1974. 242

Tate, Cecil F. The Search for a Method in American Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

Taylor, Deems, Marcelene Peterson, and Bryant Hale. A Pictorial History of the Movies. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943.

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Anthologies

Bigsby, C.W.E., ed. Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1975.

Brooks, Cleanth, R.W.B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, eds. American Literature: The Makers and the Making, 1861-1914. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973.

Burrows, David J., Frederick R. Lapides, and John T. Shawcross, eds. Myths and Motifs in Literature. New York: Free Press, 1973.

Cantor, Norman F., and Michael S. Werthman, eds. The History of Popular Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Clareson, Thomas D., ed. Many Futures; Many Worlds: Theme and Form in Science Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1977.

------s ed. SF: The Other Side of Realism: Essays on Modem Fantasy and Science Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971.

------s ed. Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976. Farmer, Philip Jose*, ed. Mother Was a Lovely Beast: A Feral Man Anthology: Fiction and Fact About Humans Raised by Animals. New York: Pyramid Books, 1976.

Fiedler, Leslie A., ed. In Dreams Awake: A Historical-Critical Anthology of Science Fiction. New York: Dell Books, 1975.

Fishwick, Marshall, and Ray B. Browne, eds. Icons of Popular Culture. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970.

Haining, Peter, ed. The Fantastic Pulps. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. 253

Hakluyt, Richard. The Principle Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques <£ Discoveries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Overland to the Remote & Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time Within the Compasse of These 1600 Years. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1907.

Hawkins, Hugh, ed. Booker T. Washington and His Critics: The Problem of Negro Leadership. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1966.

Huebel, Harry Russell, ed. Things in the Driver's Seat: Readings in Popular Culture. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973.

Jacobs, Lewis, ed. The Movies as Medium. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.

Kauffman, Stanley, and Bruce Henstell, eds. American Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to Citizen Kane. New York: Liveright, 1972.

Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Knight, Damon, ed. A Century of Short Science Fiction Novels. New York: Dell Books, 1965.

Lahue, Kalton C., ed. Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1973.

Lewis, George H., ed. Side-Saddle on the Golden Calf: Social Structure and Popular Culture in America. Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear, 1972.

Locke, Alain LeRoy, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: A. and C. Boni, 1925.

McQuade, Donald, and Robert Atwan, eds. Popular Writing in America: The Interaction of Style and Audience. Shorter ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Merideth, Robert, ed. American Studies: Essays on Theory and Method. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1968.

Mickelson, Joel C., ed. American Personality and the Creative Arts. Minneapolis, MN: Burgess, 1969.

Miller, Perry, ed. American Thought: Civil War to World War I. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961.

Miller, Ruth, ed. Blackamerican Literature: 1760-Present. Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press, 1971. 254

Moskowitz, Samuel, ed. Science Fiction by Gastight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911. Cleveland: World, 1968.

------} ed. Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Homance" in the Munsey Magazine, 1912-1920. New York: Holt, 1970.

Nachbar, Jack, and John L. Wright, eds. The Popular Culture Reader. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1977.

Patterson, Lindsay, ed. Black Films and Film-Makers: A Comprehensive Anthology from Stereotype to . New York: Dodd and Mead, 1975.

Silva, Fred, ed. Focus on The Birth of a Ration. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Simmons, Charles W., and Harry W. Morris, eds. Afro-American History. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1972.

Sklar, Robert, ed. The Plastic Age (1917-1930). New York: George Braziller, 1970.

Stover, Leon E., and , eds. Apeman, Spaceman: Anthropological Science Fiction. New York: Berkley Books, 1970.