This is a beautiful existential moment, in some ways a crystallization of the ethos running throughout all of Burroughs’s work. Tarzan is somewhere else, in a place of beauty and adventure, with no noise or bus fumes or electric bills—or responsibilities. Born free …
Seconds after this peaceful epiphany, thwap! Tarzan is caught in a rope snare, and finds himself hanging upside down, slowly spinning, as a ferocious sabretooth tiger slinks toward him. But even facing death, Tarzan is not afraid. “He had looked upon death in so many forms that it held no terror for him.” He is, however, moved to rare metaphysical introspection. The interior lives of Burroughs’s characters go largely unexplored beyond visceral reactions to whatever the situation is at hand. But here, dangling, about to be a sabre-tooth’s lunch, Tarzan thinks of First and Last Things. It’s the closest to a spiritual creed I’ve found in the Tarzan books and presumably isn’t too far from Burroughs’s own views on these matters:
Tarzan of the Apes would have preferred to die fighting, if he must die; yet he felt a certain thrill as he contemplated the magnificence of the great beast that Fate had chosen to terminate his earthly career. He felt no fear, but a certain sense of anticipation of what would follow after death. The Lord of the Jungle subscribed to no creed. Tarzan of the Apes was not a church man; yet like the majority of those who have always lived close to nature he was, in a sense, intensely religious. His intimate knowledge of the stupendous forces of nature, of her wonders and her miracles had impressed him with the fact that their ultimate origin lay far beyond the conception of the finite mind of man, and thus incalculably remote from the farthest bounds of science. When he thought of God he liked to think of Him primitively, as a personal God. And while he realized that he knew nothing of such matters, he liked to believe that after death he would live again.
Maybe it’s just as well Burroughs kept this sort of thing to a minimum. Tarzan reveals a sort of homegrown deism combined with a vaguely born-again fundamentalism—Thomas Jefferson meets George Bush. Naturally Tarzan doesn’t have to worry about the next life because just as the sabre-tooth strikes, upsy-daisy —the Sagoths who had set the snare yank him upward into the trees.
We get another glimpse into Burroughs’s attitudes a little farther on from young Jason Gridley, who’s cowering in a tree himself, watching “hundreds” of sabre-tooths slaughtering the game they’ve herded into a deadly roundup circle. Gridley sees in this a development of intelligence on the cats’ part that will lead to their extinction—in their cunning savagery they will eventually wipe out all their prey, and then turn on each other—which leads him to reflect on the future of mankind:
Nor did Jason Gridley find it difficult to apply the same line of reasoning to the evolution of man upon the outer crust and to his own possible extinction in the not far remote future. In fact, he recalled quite definitely that statisticians had shown that within two hundred years or less the human race would have so greatly increased and the natural resources of the outer world would have been so depleted that the last generation must either starve to death or turn to cannibalism to prolong its hateful existence for another short period … What would be next? Gridley was sure that there would be something after man, who is unquestionably the Creator’s greatest blunder, combining as he does all the vices of preceding types from invertebrates to mammals, while possessing few of their virtues.
Italics mine. This pessimistic blast comes out of the blue, and has a ring of conviction, all the more so because it seems so uncharacteristic of youthful gung-ho boy scientist Gridley, and feels like a peek behind the curtain into Burroughs himself. Burroughs, among his often wacky enthusiasms, was an early Greenie, ahead of his time in realizing the earth’s fragility. He gave a speech on ecology to a group on Arbor Day, 1922, and discussed conservation issues in a 1930 radio interview, so it was a lifelong concern. And “the Creator’s greatest blunder” business—well, Burroughs carried a weight of bitterness despite his huge popular success. His drive to produce—writing, movie ideas, moneymaking schemes, endless Tarzan spin-offs (among them comic strips, kids’ clubs, Tarzan bread, Tarzan ice cream cups, Tarzan belts, Tarzan bathing suits, Tarzan jungle helmets, Tarzan yoyos, Tarzan candy, etc., etc.) has in it a nervous mania, a constant thirsty seeking for something that none of this frantic activity ever managed to quench. In 1934 as his long marriage to Emma crumbled, largely due to her drinking, compounded by his own fondness for the stuff, he decided learning to fly would be just the thing, commenced taking lessons, and bought his own airplane, while also courting Florence Ashton, his second wife-to-be, and scribbling away (well, dictating away) at his nineteenth Tarzan novel, Tarzan and Jane (Tarzan’s Quest), which on completion on January 19, 1935, was rejected by Liberty, Collier’s, and others before Blue Book finally bought and began serializing it in October. It’s interesting that just as the Tarzan manuscript was being rejected, Burroughs turned again to Pellucidar, starting on Back to the Stone Age in late January. Possibly just a coincidence, but possible, too, that thinking about Pellucidar was a pleasant retreat for him, more fun than grinding out yet more Tarzan. (He said in a 1938 radio interview that he had originally planned to write only two Tarzan novels.) Back to the Stone Age marks a further drop in quality. A long flashback to the Tarzan expedition, it relates the adventures of Von Horst, a crew member who becomes separated from the others. However, Von Horst’s story is anything but memorable—just another sequence of near-death scrapes, captures, and escapes, with the usual beautiful prehistoric maiden as a love interest. This manuscript collected rejection slip after rejection slip before being bought by Argosy magazine for $1,500 and serialized as Seven Worlds to Conquer from January 9 through February 13, 1937, then published in book form under its original title by ERB in September of that year.
In 1938 Burroughs again returned to Pellucidar, writing the 60,000 words of Land of Terror between October and April 1939 while juggling other projects. The story was rejected by every magazine it was sent to. It wasn’t published until 1944, when it appeared as a book under ERB’s own imprint.
Land of Terror is told by David Innes, who begins by reflecting on how old he and Perry are, something that may have been on the author’s mind, since he was sixty-three while writing this amiable nonsense, still churning it out. David is on his way back home to Sari with some of his minions as the story opens, and, wouldn’t you know it, they are attacked as they’re crossing a river, and captured. “They were heavy-built, stocky warriors with bushy beards, a rather uncommon sight in Pellucidar where most of the pure-blood white tribes are beardless.” Odder still, “As I looked more closely at my bearded, hairy captors, the strange, the astounding truth suddenly dawned upon me. These warriors were not men; they were women.” One of these he-women comments, “Who wants any more men? I don’t. Those that I have give me enough trouble—gossiping, nagging, never doing their work properly. After a hard day hunting or fighting, I get all worn out beating them after I get home.”
Yes, we’re hearing an echo of Pantaletta, with Burroughs indulging in the same role-reversal comedy found in the earlier novel, without superior results. Innes is dragged to Oog, their primitive village, where he encounters “a hairless, effeminate little man,” the husband of Gluck, the leader, she of the “legs like a pro-football guard and ears like a cannoneer.” Away from the women, hubby and a few other men grouse about the women. “‘If I were bigger and stronger than Gluck, I’d beat her with a stick every time I saw her.’ ‘You don’t seem very fond of Gluck,’ I said. ‘Did you ever see a man who was fond of a woman?’ demanded Foola. ‘We hate the brutes.’” David is tossed under guard into a hut, where he meets Zor, a fellow prisoner, who tells him, “‘They have none of the natural sensibilities of women and only the characteristics of the lowest and most brutal types of men,’” another sentiment that might be straight out of Pantaletta. A few sleeps later (no one ever knows what time it is in Pellucidar) David, slaving and starving in Gluck’s garden, can’t resist gra
bbing a tuber and gnawing ravenously on it. This enrages a female sentry, but he manages to coldcock her before she can do him in with her bone knife. Gluck turns up, angered that the sentry tried to beat one of her men, and they struggle—until at last Gluck kills the other woman. David watches it all and is moved to philosophy:
There followed one of the most brutal fights I have ever witnessed. They pounded, kicked, clawed, scratched and bit one another like two furies. The brutality of it sickened me. If these women were the result of taking women out of slavery and attempting to raise them to equality with man, then I think that they and the world would be better off if they were returned to slavery.
One of the sexes must rule; and man seems temperamentally better fitted for the job than woman. Certainly if full power over man has resulted in debauching and brutalizing women to such an extent, then we should see that they remain always subservient to man, whose overlordship is, more often than not, tempered by gentleness and sympathy.
At the time Burroughs’s second marriage was in trouble. And despite his tireless effort and the ubiquity of Tarzan (published in thirty-five countries, translated into fifty-eight languages), he still struggled financially; the dark shadows of the coming war were falling as well over his little empire and sales were dropping. Soon paper rationing and shortages would force major cutbacks in his book publications. Perhaps worse, Burroughs was losing faith in himself as a writer. I can think of no other writer of his established popularity whose work was so routinely rejected; and it galled him, too, that he was little more than a joke to the literary community—his would-be peers. All this wore on him, led him into bouts of depression and the dubious fleeting solace of whiskey. In June 1939 Florence underwent major surgery, and, in August of that year, primarily to cut down expenses, they decided to move to Hawaii. Then in November Burroughs suffered several minor heart attacks. Arriving in Hawaii in April 1940, Florence seems to have hated it from the start, possibly since they had left a fairly luxurious Beverly Hills apartment for a scruffy Hawaiian beach shack also semi-inhabited by rats and scorpions. Burroughs made the garage his office. Friends began noticing the tension between him and Florence, along with signs of increased drinking on Burroughs’s part. Still he amassed stacks of pages, knocking off a new Pellucidar short story, “Hodon and O-AA,” in one week during September.
Burroughs would live until 1950, but for all practical purposes his writing career sputtered to an end right here. He would continue to write the occasional Tarzan novel or stray short story, but never again at the manic pace he had maintained since 1911. The marriage to Florence ended in March 1941 when she and the children sailed back to California; they were divorced and she remarried not long afterward. Depressed, turning even more to the bottle, he gained a reprieve of sorts when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—soon he had gotten himself a gig as a war correspondent, and spent the war years reporting from all over the Pacific. After the war he moved back to the L.A. area, but his health was so shattered by angina, Parkinson’s, and arteriosclerosis that from 1947 on, when he bought his first television set, he spent much of his time in front of it watching sports. In 1948 he experienced severe painful angina. As the Hillman site puts it, “When the nitro-glycerine doesn’t work he turns to bourbon. Over the coming months there is a reliance on bourbon for all ills.” He spent much of 1949 rereading all his books—”to see what I had said and how I’d said it.” He died March 19, 1950, after breakfast in bed, while reading the Sunday comics. Shortly before his death he said, “If there is a hereafter, I want to travel through space to visit the other planets”—a dreamy kid to the very end.
Burroughs’s final (and forgettable) tales of Pellucidar were published in the early 1940s, in a sci-fi pulp magazine called Amazing Stories, then newly under the editorship of Ray Palmer—who in 1945 began using his magazine to create a major league flap about the hollow earth that came to be known as “The Shaver Mystery.”
These Ace paperbacks from the 1960s of the Pellucidar series, published decades after they were written, are tangible examples of its continuing appeal. (© Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.)
The so-called Shaver Mystery was kicked off with “I Remember Lemuria” in this March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories.
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THE HOLLOW EARTH LIVES: EVIL NAZIS, FLYING SAUCERS, SUPERMAN, NEW AGE UTOPIAS
IN THE EARLY 1940S, Amazing Stories had an energetic new editor. Ray Palmer was a gnomish young man slightly over four feet tall, and he had been hired in 1939 to breathe life into a magazine that had been launched in April 1926 as the first all–science fiction magazine by Hugo Gernsback, the pioneering editor who coined the term. But by the time Palmer took over, the magazine was moribund, sluggish editorially, circulation dropping.
Palmer was a fan of the biff! zap! pow! space opera branch of science fiction—as embodied by Burroughs, the elder statesman of the form—and began filling the magazine with such stuff. It didn’t earn him any critical praise. About the same time, Astounding Science Fiction, which had been around since 1930, had become a more highbrow competitor, and the young writers published regularly there (including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Theodore Sturgeon) became the now-legendary icons whose work began the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, while most writers of the boisterous trash in Amazing Stories are long forgotten. But Palmer’s gambit of appealing to a younger, less sophisticated audience paid off in sales—and with the Shaver Mystery, circulation, well, skyrocketed.
As Palmer later told it, it all started
when one day a letter came in giving the details of an ‘ancient alphabet’ that ‘should not be lost to the world.’ It was opened by my managing editor, Howard Browne, who read it with the typical orthodox attitude, and tossed it into the wastepaper basket with the comment “The world is full of crackpots.” … I retrieved the letter from the wastebasket, examined the alphabet, and made a few casual experiments. I went about the office to those who were familiar with other languages than English, and came up with a few more interesting results. That was Enough. I published the letter in Amazing Stories.64
The letter, appearing in the December 1943 issue, was from Richard S. Shaver. In it he—with some help from Palmer—claimed that the ancient alphabet he had discovered embedded in many English words was “definite proof of the Atlantean legend … suggesting the god legends have a base in some wiser race than modern man.” And this race, of course, had lived inside the hollow earth.
To Palmer’s considerable surprise, the letter drew a huge response from readers; and Shaver followed up with a 10,000-word manuscript titled “A Warning for Man”—which became, after Palmer got done rewriting and embellishing it, the 31,000-word “I Remember Lemuria!” This first Shaver Mystery story, detailing Shaver’s “actual” experiences with remnants of an advanced subterranean race, ran in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories. The press run of 125,000 sold out. Shaver had other manuscripts on hand. Drastically rewritten by Palmer, “Thought Records of Lemuria” ran in the next issue—which sold 200,000 copies, according to Palmer, at any rate. Actual circulation numbers were never released. Letters poured in by the thousands—50,000 in response to the first piece, Palmer said—nearly all testifying to similar experiences of encounters with bizarre beings living in vast labyrinthine caves. Related as true experiences, it should be emphasized. Palmer’s Shaver stories had struck some strange unexpected chord, and Palmer cheerfully played chorus after chorus. Nearly every issue of Amazing Stories for the next two years featured a Shaver story, peaking with an all-Shaver issue in June 1947.
Dennis Crenshaw, who for some years has produced The Hollow Earth Insider, both as a print and more recently an online journal, provides a good short summary of Shaver’s claims:
Over 12,000 years ago a race known as the Titan-Altans came from a distant planet and settled on earth. They first settled on the continent of Atlantis and their culture spread all across the new planet. These extrater
restrial aliens communicated by thought transference and had spaceships that could travel at the speed of light. They also understood genetics far beyond our knowledge today and constructed “robot races” to do their dirty work. One of these “robot races” are our ancestors…. They also created fabulous machines that could have taken care of their every want and need. Then their top scientists discovered the sun and its harsh radioactive rays was causing them to age. They began to construct huge cave-cities underground, using existing caverns when possible and then using huge machines to excavate even larger ones. Over a long period of time these cavern realms grew until they covered twice as much area as the exterior lands. However, moving underground didn’t help. The whole planet was contaminated and Titans were only living for a few hundred years. The decision was to abandon the planet. According to Shaver their population was “more than fifty million” … and “There wasn’t enough spacecraft to transport all the Titans…. So many of the robots were left behind to fend for themselves; those who became our ancestors returned to the surface, adjusting to the sun’s radiation, and after many generations forgot about the caves beneath them.” But many other robots remained in the cavern cities…. Although they survived and reproduced, most of them degenerated into a race of psychotic dwarfs Shaver called dero, short for detrimental robots. There were others in the caves who managed to stave off the mental and physical deterioration of the dero, and did all they could to defeat them; they were the tero (integrative robots). However the deros were in control of all the wonderful machines left behind by the departing Titans and they used them to cause trouble for the humans on the exterior of the planet, everything from train, plane and car accidents to stubbing toes and misplaced house keys, according to Shaver, was the fault of the deros.65
Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio Page 25
