Or The Curious Business of Meal Tickets and Realms of Fantasy
Recently I’ve been happily plowing through a biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs. A hefty two-volume affair, by Irwin Porges, it is eminently entertaining reading and above all packed with quotes.
The must unexpected aspect of Burroughs’ life seems to be his constant skirmishing with editors and film-makers, indeed with nearly everyone involved in commericializing his work. Petulant and disgruntled letters by the score show up throughout his correspondance. Burroughs would simultaneously rail against “high-brows” and hollow honours (claiming to be a low-brow himself, writing only for entertainment) and quietly write to an influential friend enquiring why Tarzan wasn’t in the dictionary yet. He relentlessly hounded his publishers for higher royalties, complained about cover artwork and movie adaptations, threatened to give up writing altogether with an energy and persistance equalled only by his actual writing output itself.
Epidermic reactions to what he perceived as menaces from abroad characterize his ficition, resulting in the systematic nationalizing of villians in his novels – both world wars produced a bevy of despicable Huns into whose bellies he yearned to see Tarzan shove spears (when he wasn’t feeding them to lions; Japanese villians too get a thrashing in the early 40’s). Later, when faced with the disastrous reception of the Tarzan tales when they were translated in Germany, coupled with a vigorous press campaign and public outcry (hardly a surprise), he cautioned his editor to remove any passages that could be perceived as racist, claiming he never meant to offend. Not above a little armchair vituperation from the comfort of his home, second thoughts came quickly when book sales were in danger.
Evil Russians are pretty much a regular feature, but nothing beats “Under the Red Flag” for sheer futuristic doom and gloom. His dystopian America in the 21st century under Bolshevik domination was so transparently and venomously anti-communist that his editors told him to just forget publishing it altogether. (It was rejected eleven times between 1919 and 1921.) Undeterred, he rewrote the story, replacing Communists by invading Kalkars from the Moon from under whose iron rule brave Earthmen fight for freedom, led by Julian 9th, born in 2100 in a Commune of the Chicago Soviet. It finally appeared as “The Moon Men”, becoming the second in a trilogy, flanked by “The Moon Maid” and “The Red Hawk”. (The truly novel facet to these stories is the repeated reincarnation of villian and hero, through the four-hundred-year feud of the houses of Julian and Or-tis, ending with a final battle on the Moon itself and reconciliation of the two dynasties – Mundane Romeo and Seleno-Juliet, but with a happy ending.)
Nor was Burroughs opposed to a little well-meaning eugenism on the side in his science fiction, the human race benefitting from careful breeding like prize horses or bulls. He even managed to conceive of a full egalitarian and happy race without class or inequality, nevertheless dominated by a hereditary dictatorship. He also believed to some extent that characteristics such as diligence, intelligence and general uprighteousness were inherited and racial. Usually he expressed his outlook indirectly through his fiction; his views in editorials are often uncomfortable to read today.
Born in 1875, he spent much of his schooling in military academies, where he was a fractious and undisciplined cadet. When his application at West Point was rejected, he joined the 7th Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory while the West was still wild enough to have roving bands of Apaches and serious outlaws. When he married in 1900, he and his wife Emma survived “just ahead of the sheriff” for years, Burroughs engaging determinedly in countless unsuccessful business ventures and dead-end jobs (the last one was selling pencil sharpeners) before finally turning to fiction. Unimpressed by the content of the pulps* of the time, he was convinced, as he later reminisced: “…if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.”
Burroughs casually dismissed his fiction as mere entertainment, calling it his “meal ticket”. He disliked “recognized” authors, or rather the lionizing of them by the intelligentsia he so depised, adding that intelligent people made him feel sleepy. (He did wonder out loud why authors like Zane Grey, who he considered a peer, were making so much more money than he was. Still he was wounded by what he esteemed and unjustified lack of recognition – his jeremiads take on a feigned casual air, dropping the “g” from “-ing” when he is feelin’ self-pity and claimin’ just the the opposite.) He had the underdog’s loathing of lawyers, scorn for literary critics, exceedingly curious and cynical notions about politics and government, and hated golf. Nor did he have much sympathy for “the masses”, while lauding the qualities of the common man (his first stories were written under the peculiar pseudonym of “Normal Bean”), he took no real interest in him beyond magazine circulation. Burroughs was, though, something of an ecologist before the word was invented, and during his tenure at his Tarzana ranch he planted trees energetically and drove hunters away with gusto. (Ecologist, but not one to pass up a good deal; he subdivided the ranch into building lots and created a golf course as fast-spreading Los Angeles suburbs and rising land prices came his way.)
And in all fairness, if his bark could be sharp, his bite was… well, inexistant. He never resorted to underhanded tricks so common in the budding movie industry, and despite his eagerness to turn a quick profit, scrupulously avoided all murky endeavours. Had he travelled more extensively, his view of the world would have likely been largely more balanced; he was also quick and open about renouncing prejudices when he gained a better understanding. Like Lovecraft, his opinionated rants seem to come more from the insecurity bred of unfamiliarity, he displays none of the paranoia and bluster of Robert E. Howard, Conan’s creator, and led a far more normal life than the pessimistic recluse from Providence. Nor does he seem to have participated in the steady correspondance they and other fantasy writers exchanged. He did, however, scrupulously reply to letters from readers, and carried on long epistolary exchanges with several.
Above all, he is an illustrator’s author, providing, through his astonishingly fertile imagination, a wealth of worlds which have provided the inspiration for generations of painters and illustrators. All in all, he was very much what he claimed loudly to be, a decent ordinary American, open to prejudice and intolerance, with little first-hand knowledge of the world outside (Burroughs’ only trips abroad came in his 60’s when he moved to Hawaii with his second wife, and became a war correspondant in the Pacific Theatre following Pearl Harbour), but an earnestness, and a basic honesty beyond reproach. An irrepressible sense of self-deprecation is his grandest saving grace. (Burroughs claimed that he had lived a life far too boring to be of interest to anyone and episodes gleaned from his fiction, the life of the “Other Burroughs”, the one born in Peking for example, where his father was military adviser to the Empress of China, and who lived there, in the Forbidden City, until the age of ten, have now blurred the line between fact and fiction and are taken by many at face value. Burroughs would certainly have been most amused.) His bull-headed and indefatigable defence of his rights and royalties is admirable. Well before it became commonplace, he inaugurated meet-the-author sessions for his public, and invested a huge amount of energy in the Tarzan clubs (cynics would say it was to groom his future reading public, but Tarzan was very much a Baden-Powell figure in leopardskin trunks). Also, thanks to a carefully preserved correspondance, it’s possible to glean an idea of his interaction with the illustrators visualizing his worlds and the close (very close) attention he reserved for their work.
Nowadays, with Tarzan largely a household world, fully absorbed into general global culture along with the likes of Coca-Cola, the character no longer quite carries the punch he did while the author was busily spinning tales and basically taking on all comers:
FAKE TARZANS ARE WARNED BY FAMED AUTHOR
Burroughs Says His Character Is Losing Face
Nevada State Journal
Reno, Nevada
Saturday, May 20, 1939
By Frederick C. Othman
TARZANA, Cal., May 19, 1939 (U.P): Edgar Rice Burroughs served notice Friday on all unauthorized Tarzans, whose number is legion and whose ears mostly are cauliflower, to quit insulting the name that he made famous. As creator of a major industry based upon the adventures of his mythical ape man, Burroughs informed the Tarzans, including wrestlers, prize fighters, and professional footballers, that they’re making a bum of the original Tarzan. He said they’d have to change their names or face the consequences.
Hits Wrestlers
“What got me worried about the situation,” he reported here in the white stucco lair of Tarzan, the ape man, “was a wrestling match I saw the other night, featuring a Mr. Tarzan Orth. “This Mr. Tarzan Orth danced around the ring a while, fell on his face, and posed like dying fawn. And all the fans at ringside took out their handkerchiefs and waved them at Mr. Tarzan Orth and said: ‘“Yoo-hoo, Tartan!’”
This insult to the king of the jungle, whom he first imagined in 1912 and who has been going strong ever since in books, magazines, newspapers, and movie theaters, caused Burroughs to write sharp notes to all the Tarzans he knew. A typical letter from the president of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., went to a Mr. Tarzan White, member of the west coast wrestling syndicate. It said:
“I have not granted you permission to the use of this name and I now notify you that I do not grant such permission. Your use of this name in connection with your activities may result in confusion in the minds of the public and remit in damage to this character and its name.”
One Real Tarzan
Burroughs said there was only one man in the world authorized to can himself Tarzan and that was Mr. Johnny Weissmuller, for whom Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios had paid the proper fee and who actually looked on the silver sheet like Tarzan ought to look.
“The other, self-christened Tarzans are apes, all right.” Burroughs said, “only they’re muscle bound and have broken noses. Furthermore, ‘Tarzan’’ is a copyrighted trademark and if these plug uglies insist upon using it I’m going to insist on the right to license them and stencil the copyright number on their chests.”
The genial Burroughs, who operates all his Tarzan enterprises from this town named after his celebrated character, said he’d had considerable Tarzan trouble lately. “And the worst was when I bought a pedigreed sheep dog for my son,” he said. “The boy wanted to name his pet Tarzan’ and would you know? The breeders association would not let us use that name. They said somebody else already had a sheep dog named ‘Tarzan.’ “And that’s the way it goes and I’m getting tired of it.”
Names Approved
Burroughs said finally that he understood some parents had named their babies Tarzan.’ This, he said, is okay. A Tarzan that starts from scratch should turn into a fine young man and be a credit to the keen-eyed, lithe-limbed Tarzan I, who has been earning his creator handsome dividends for the last 27 years.
Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote over eighty novels and collections of short stories, inventing not only Tarzan’s Africa (filled with lost kingdoms, savage tribes and disoriented foreigners), but also Barsoom (the John Carter of Mars series), Pellucidar (his Hollow Earth novels), Amtor (set on Venus) and the lost island of Caspak, as well as a good number of westerns and historical romances.
His first novel, “Under the Moons of Mars”, was serialized in The All-Story magazine in 1912.
His longest novel, the 125,000-word “Marcia of the Doorstep”, remained unpublished until 1999.
He died on March 19, 1950.
I must have read the whole Burroughs opus before I was fifteen. (I’m not at all sure I could manage it now, any more than I can still read authors like Robert E. Howard, who I adored beyond reason.) I soldiered right through ALL the Tarzan novels, with their endless succession of lost anachronsitic empires and malevolent but seductive princesses, purchased (I still have them) the DoubleDay hardcover book club editions of his Mars series illustrated by Frank Frazetta (much of my pocket money went to mail-order books), hunted down and found nearly all the old Ace paperbacks with Frazetta covers and the funny red lettering with the spiky bits. Burroughs was nothing if not prolific; he wrote at an astonishing speed, being the master of the cliff-hanger ending, leaving readers positively baying for a sequel. He wrote twenty-three for Tarzan alone.
I bought copies of all Burroughs’ Martian, Venusian, Inner-Earth and various and sundry other novels when Ace recommissioned Frank Frazetta to do the covers in the 70’s and re-purchased the whole lot of Tarzan paperbacks when Neal Adams and Boris did new covers. (I may even have read the things again, go figure, but it’s likely I just laid them out side by side on the floor of my room and daydreamed over them.) My biggest investment, though, was signing up for the the Edgar Rice Burroughs Library of Illustration: Limited Centennial Edition, from Russ Cochran, Publisher, which must have cost about 10 acres of raspberries picked at 2 dollars a flat during the long summers leading up to fall 1976. ( I had tried strawberries, but was no match for the nimble-fingered housewives who could pick a row at three times my speed. I eventually went for cherries, apricots and pears, happier perched on ladders than bruising my knees in strawberrry patches. Back then it as still possible to earn enough in one summer for the next term in art school. Fruit financed my first forays into literature and illustration.)
Weighing in at a good 15 pounds (with slipcase) the Library is a compendium of the artwork produced over the years for various Burroughs novels.
Volume One is dedicated largely to illustrator J. Allen St. John.** Born in 1875, a contemporary of the likes of Franklin Booth and N. C. Wyeth, St. John created a considerable number of paintings for Burroughs’ novels. His meticulous research, diligently reading manuscripts and taking scrupulous notes, did nothing to compromise his free painterly style (underpinned by a faultless academicism) and classical mastery of light. (He also seemed relatively immune to Burroughs’ peevish interventionism, doubtlessly secure in the knowledge that if given too hard a time there was plenty of work elsewhere.)
J. Allen St. John’s work appears on the hardcover editions of many Burroughs stories, until replaced in the early sixties by decidedly less inspired illustrators like C. Edmond Monroe Jr., who were likely calculated to have more appeal to a juvenile public. (To see some of St. John’s covers, J. Allen St. John’s Edgar Rice Burroughs Dustwrapper Gallery. Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s Violet Books site is a treasure trove of Golden Age illustration, by the way.)
The first cover ever done for Tarzan, however, is the work of Clinton Pettee, who seems only to be remembered only through that one picture, published on the cover of the October 1912 edition of ” All-Story” magazine and entitled “Tarzan of the Apes: A Romance of the Jungle”. Burroughs carelessly inserted a tiger named “Sabor” in the book, drawing a few cynical letters-to-the-editor and touching off a heated epistolary debate as to the nature and meaning of the word “tiger” in colonial Africa. He removed the embarassing Sabor when Tarzan finally appeared in book form. The novel was published by A. C. McClurg & Co. in 1914, with the decidedly unathletic silhouette of Tarzan slouching on a branch by an artist named Fred J. Arting, who, like Pettee, seems only to be remembered in relation to his subject. The cover was reprinted steadily from 1914 through the 1950’s, when a decidedly awful picture by Gerald McCann was substituted. (Burroughs would have sent a blistering letter about that one, for sure.)
Despite being ERB’s favorite illustrator, St. John received the occasional broadside. In July 1927, Burroughs sent a scathing letter of reproof to the editor about St. John’s cover painting for “The War Chief”. “The figure of the Indian is not of an Apache, it does not look like an Indian and is as homely as Hell. I did not mind so much when I saw it on the magazine cover, but I was nearly sick when I saw that you had adopted it for the book, as I wassure St. John would do something really worth while for it. There is nothing of the atmosphere or colouring of Arizona in the foliage or background; in fact the whole things is atrocious and if the picture can kill sales, I am confident this one will.” In the increasingly heated exchange of letters that followed, ERB added “You do not have to tell me why this jacket was selected. It was solely because it was bought cheap… and a couple of hundred dollars saved.”
Delaware artist Frank Schoonover (1877-1972), though more readily associated with the likes of James Fenimore Cooper, also did a few illustrations for “A Princess of Mars” in 1917. There is even, astonishingly enough, a Tarzan cover by N.C. Wyeth, the cover of “New Story Magazine” for the Return of Tarzan, in August 1913. The Return of Tarzan was serialized by over seven issues between June and December; Wyeth also did the cover for the first installment which is presumed lost, indeed I’ve only ever seen the one that is familiar to everbody. (Additionally, he did a cover for All Story magazine’s publication of “The Outlaw of Torn” in January 1914.) Burroughs wrote to enquire about purchasing the originals, and was told it was an unofficial “custom of the house” to sell them for half of the fee paid the artist – in this case, fifty dollars each. Burroughs could not pay the amount and let the matter drop. In 1965, Hulbert Burroughs’ curiosity was piqued by the mention of the Wyeth cover, tracked it down and purchased it for $1,500.00.
Volume Two kicks off with the competent and often elegant but rather tame Tarzan illustrations by Studley O. Burroughs, son of ERB’s older brother Henry. Studley’s style was ill-suited to ERB’s demands and ERB supplied agonizingly detailed resumés of what he wished to see on each cover. Replying to a submission of sketches, he wrote ” Do you object to my telling you exactly what I wanted? I know some artists do.” When he saw the finished cover of “Tarzan Triumphant”, he had this to say: “He is too prissy and has a belly on him almost as large as mine… Tarzan Triumphant looks as though he might be several months along towards an increase in the family…”
In passing, he criticised St. John, blaming him for dropping sales, seeming not to take into account the deepening Depression. “If you have any of my former books I wish you would note the almost total loss of outstanding sales value in St. John’s jackets. As works of art they seem to me about all that could be desired, but as outstanding, compelling attention attractors they are not so hot.”
Studley’s drinking problems (and doubtlessly the feeling of working for an ungrateful – and close family – client for low fees and too few kind words) ended up resulting in missed deadlines and disappointment. Eventually ERB dropped him and took up again with St. John.
The first Tarzan comic, syndicated in 1929, is done by Hal Foster, each strip (60 in all) being a handful of vignettes with text below, the very early beginnings of the daily comic strip. Foster’s next contribution, full-sized Sunday pages, still has no word balloons, but a far looser layout, with dialogue in quotation marks inside the panels. He kept at it from 1931 to 1937, before moving on to Prince Valiant.
Volume Two is very largely dedicated to the illustrations of John Coleman Burroughs, Edgar’s son, whose work, alas, is uninspired where it’s not simply mediocre. ERB dropped J. Allen St. John in favour of his son, with editors no doubt heaving a sigh of relief, spared the unenviable role of the middle man trying to placate the sensibilities of both parties. (And in the end, probably not caring so much what went on a cover as long as it sold well.) In 1937, John did his first Burroughs cover for “The Oakdale Affair” and “The Rider”. In the words of ERB “…it has always been the ambition of my son, Jack, and myself that one day he would illustrate one of my books. He is doing very excellent work, and I am having him illustrate the Spring book for us.” John Coleman Burroughs went on to illustrate practically everything, over one hundred paintings in all. (Curiously for a stickler like Burroughs père, EVERY depiction of a bow and arrow is wholly wrong.) There is also a generous selection of John Coleman Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars and Pellucidar comics (over-generous – nearly 100 pages). The book is rounded off with Dell Comic Tarzan covers by Morris Gollub, whose Tarzan looks very much the 1950’s Charles Atlas type, clean-cut and wholesome, but not particularly inspired.
Volume Three sums up with the idols of my teenage artist-hero worship: Frank Frazetta and Roy G. Krenkel. (I never warmed to Reed Crandall, who only did work on the Mars books because Al Williamson, the illustrator originally considered, was too busy.) I of course missed Hal Foster (he was far happier doing Price Valiant anyway) and his successor Burne Hogarth (but quite frankly, his unrelenting action poses in every possible situation are tiring after a while, as are the wooden faces of his protagonists. How Tarzan maintains those astonishing stances with both feet so consistently planted firmly on the ground has always been beyond me), but assiduously collected Russ Manning’s Sunday colour pages. Naturally, Frazetta’s work recaptures the magic, absent since St. John. The earlier Tarzan work from the 1950’s is in watercolour, before his switch to oils and the full development of his trademark style. One wonders what Burroughs would have thought. Likely he would have approved wholeheartedly.
In the same volume is J. Allen St. John’s last Tarzan illustration a pen and ink rendering of “Tarzan and the Eagle”after the 1919 colour painting done for “Jungle Tales of Tarzan”, done in 1957, the year of his death.
So why this double detour, both into my teen fantasies and the age of pulps? Well, I’m like everbody else, I thought I was pretty well-informed. But, as usual, it turns that there’s always a lot more behind a few pictures than you ever imagine. And besides, detours are always worth taking, they never do lead where you expect.
COMING UP
The French edition of the Fantasy Art Workshop is due out April 17th (curiously enough “fantasy art” in English now translates as “fantasy art” in French, with the term “la fantasy” now busily working its way towards inclusion in French dictionaries), so we will be in Paris for a little show at the Galerie Arludik. (When the page comes up, click on “PROCHAINEMENT” in the menu.) The opening is at 18:30. The following day, April 18th: event – signing session, etc. – at the FNAC Montparnasse at 5:30 p.m.
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GALERIE ARLUDIK
12-14 rue Saint-Louis en l’Île,
75004 PARIS
For more information:
Diane LAUNIER
Tél/Fax : 01 43 26 19 22
Portable : 06 60 10 48 92
CONTACTS@ARLUDIK.COM
COMING (BACK) UP (AGAIN)
“There and Back Again” has been rescheduled on the Swiss television TSR 2, this time at quarter to midnight on April 4th. Talk about prime time…
* The pulps were of course the prime market for writers of fiction of all sorts in the first half of the 20th century in the US. Printed on cheap wood pulp paper, they were the descendants of the “penny dreadfuls” of the century before. “Glossies” refers to magazines rather more up-market, printed on better stock.
**Links to these artists will lead you to Jim Vadeboncoeur’s truly excellent Illustrators site. Not only does Jim provide a concise introduction to each artist, but he furnishes ample links for further reading and research. Also, if you are an admirer of the Golden Age of Illustration and you don’t have EVERY copy of ImageS, then you must do some catching up. For a thorough immersion (take a deep breath) in the ERB universe, go to the official Edgar Rice Burroughs web site.
