Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the Scientific Romance in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne.

  The full-color cover by Clinton Pettee depicts Tarzan with his right arm encircling the throat of a great lion and his left hand uplifted with a dagger, ready to plunge it into the beast's side. A quiver of arrows is strung around his neck, and in the background a white man with a spear in his hand watches the dramatic contest in open-mouthed amazement. The cover carried the title Tarzan of the Apes and beneath it the subtitle "A Romance of the Jungle." The novel was printed complete in a single issue, occupying 132 of the 240 pages the readers received in those days for 15 cents, and this did not include another twenty pages of advertisements on coated stock. There was a single interior illustration, a silhouette of Tarzan swinging from a tree, which was unsigned.

  "We believe that it goes without saying," the editors wrote in "All-Story Table-Talk," "that 'Tarzan of the Apes' is about as original a yarn as we've seen in a long while, and we shall be very much disappointed if we don't hear the same from some of our friendly readers."

  There cannot be too many adults unfamiliar with the plot of Tarzan of the Apes, but for those few exceptions it is a recommended reading experience. A man and wife are stranded on a wild portion of the African coast by a mutinous crew. They build shelter and manage to survive. The woman saves her husband from death at the hands of a great ape, but the experience unsets her mind. That night a baby boy is born to her. She dies one year later, and in his grief her husband does not hear three great apes enter the cabin. He is killed, but his son is snatched up by a she ape who has recently lost her young one. She suckles the child, and it grows to manhood among the apes, becoming super-normally strong with an animal's acute sensory development. As time goes by the young Tarzan finds the cabin and teaches himself to read and write from the primers therein.

  Gradually he rises to supremacy over the ape tribe, and the African natives come to fear his strength and ingenuity.

  Another group of whites is put ashore by a mutinous crew, this time including a girl named Jane Porter. Among them is Cecil Clayton, an heir to the Greystoke fortune and a relative of Tarzan's. The group is saved by Tarzan from a series of near disasters, including Jane's capture by a Great Ape and rescue by Tarzan, which builds the foundation for love between them.

  Back in England, Jane decides to marry Cecil Clayton, feeling that her attraction to Tarzan is an irrational primeval desire. She tells Tarzan, who also loves her, why she has made her decision. Within moments a telegram is received by Tarzan confirming that he is the son of Lord Greystoke and entitled to the estate. This will leave Cecil Clayton and his wife-to-be, Jane Porter, without any substantive means. Tarzan keeps the news to himself, and when Clayton asks him how he ever got into the jungle, the story ends with a renunciation of both love and fortune:

  "I was born there," replies Tarzan, quietly. "My mother was an ape, and of course she couldn't tell me much about it. I never knew who my father was."

  From the instant the story was distributed, the letters came like a torrent. The readers were both delighted and furious. Thrilled by the freshness of the plot and caliber of storytelling, they were outraged that the magnificent, noble Tarzan had come out on the short end of the situation. They pleaded, demanded, and threatened dire consequences if a sequel was not written to rectify the unsatisfactory situation.

  Within days after the issue reached the newsstand, both Metcalf and his boss, Robert H. Davis, realized they had an incredible success on their hands. Davis had discovered dozens of famed authors before and would develop and discover scores more, but none had aroused reader interest of such enthusiastic proportions as Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  Before the issue was off the stands, Metcalf wrote Burroughs on September 18 begging for a sequel. A reply from Burroughs September 20 expressed doubts as to his ability to write a good follow up, but told Metcalf that a sequel to Under the Moons of Mars, plotted to develop the implications of the valley of Dor, the sea of Korus, and the river Iss, was almost finished.

  The manuscript, The Gods of Mars, was mailed from Chicago October 2 and accepted October 11. On October 12 Metcalf mailed Burroughs scores of laudatory letters. On October 16 a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars was sent for the eighty-five thousand-word manuscript, with the understanding that it, too, would be published under Burroughs' name. This was followed on October 21 by still more laudatory letters.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs expressed dissatisfaction with the size of the check on October 30, stating that he felt he deserved more. He asked that more letters commenting upon his work be forwarded. On November 19 Metcalf agreed to up the word rate on the next manuscript and to keep the letters flowing.

  There was another compelling reason why THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE desperately needed Edgar Rice Burroughs at this particular moment in its history. All over America the price of periodicals was mounting. Frank A. Munsey, pioneer of the ten-cent popular magazine supported by advertising, and then pioneer again of the ten-cent all-fiction pulp, which was self-sustaining because of its low production costs, had used this as his major selling stance.

  Now the situation reached the point where Munsey could no longer hold the line. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, with 192 pages of fiction for ten cents, was a tremendous bargain, but aside from a regular presentation of science fiction and fantasy, it was not demonstrably superior to its many competitors. Once the price went to fifteen cents, an increase of fifty percent, its survival would be dependent upon the quality of its content and the appeal of its story policy. A companion magazine, THE CAVALIER, in policy and appearance virtually identical with THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, hadn't been making it even at 192 pages for ten cents, and a radical experiment in weekly publication for it was being tried. There was no reason to believe that THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE without its advantage of low price could effectively buck the competition.

  Except for the advent of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  The first fifteen-cent issue of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was July, 1912. In the preceding number, the publisher, Frank A. Munsey, on a blue four-page insert, had broken the news to the readers, offering as justification a quadrupling in authors' rates in the preceding twenty years, a great advance in paper and printing costs, the reluctance of the news dealers to promote the low-priced magazines, and reminding one and all that he and his magazines had been the avant-garde of popular-priced publications. He promised a much larger magazine, an increase from 192 to 240 pages, a more readable type face, and a book-length novel complete in each issue.

  For the first fifteen-cent issue the novel would be The Red Book of Mystery, a superior murder mystery involving a young doctor in a Scottish village, by Robert Simpson. Between 1917 and 1920 Robert Simpson would select manuscripts for THE ARGOSY, in 1919 he would have the modest distinction of being chosen as one of America's top ninety novelists by critic Charles C. Baldwin, and he would become the editor of the praiseworthy MYSTERY MAGAZINE in 1926. Even if all this accomplishment had been telescoped in time to the year 1912, it could not have made him the salvation THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE needed to carry it successfully through its price change.

  The biggest thing in their favor was that Under the Moons of Mars concluded with the July issue and carried over enough enthralled readers to give the revamped magazine a fair sampling.

  The almost frantic buildup for the Tarzan novel in September, throwing it lock, stock, and barrel into the October number, underscored the urgency of their situation. They were buying time, issue by issue, month by month, until they could stabilize their readership. The entire structure of the magazine world was changing, that of the popular family magazines as well as of Hie pulps, and (heir place in (he new order was still clouded.

  * J. Norman Lynd contributed a cartoon to a 1916 issue of the weekly Life, depicting Frank A. Munsey, owner of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, as a gravedigger, burying the many newspapers he bought and then discarded. When Munsey bought The NEW
YORK HERALD in 1920, one of his first acts was to fire Lynd, who was working for that paper as a cartoonist, he may never have been aware that Lynd had been a widely used illustrator of his own magazines.

  2. SCIENCE FICTION IN "THE ARGOSY"

  THE ARGOSY, Frank A. Munsey's initial magazine, had been an immensely successful all-fiction pulp, the first all-fiction pulp, and had prospered for nine years prior to the launching of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was not a calculated venture but a hasty reaction to competition. THE ARGOSY magazine had gone through many changes, but with the October, 1896, number Frank A. Munsey converted it from a second-rate general magazine of articles, fiction, and photos (the dimensions of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC) to an all-fiction magazine printed on a good grade of uncoated stock, dropping that for pulp paper in December. There were 192 pages for ten cents, printed straight across the page like a book, with the names of the authors at the end of the stories in italics. Frank A. Munsey asserted that the circulation doubled when he made the policy change, from forty thousand to eighty thousand in a single issue, then inexplicably leveled out for four years, after which sales soared upward. He gave net-profit figures year by year to verify this fact. By 1904 the magazine had passed the four-hundred-thousand mark and would reach a half-million in the year ahead. Profits for the year ended December, 1904, would be two hundred thirty-seven thousand dollars and would reach three hundred thousand by 1907.

  Circulation may have been helped by combining two publications with THE ARGOSY during that period. PETERSON'S MAGAZINE was absorbed with the September, 1899, issue. The magazine had been running steadily since its January, 1842, issue, and was noted for a high literary tone in its nonfiction, which made it a strange bedfellow for THE ARGOSY. The other publication was JUNIOR MUNSEY, begun as QUAKER in 1897 and combined with THE ARGOSY with the April, 1902, number.

  What part, if any, did science fiction play in the early success of THE ARGOSY? It is difficult to weigh this factor, through obviously it did not retard it, since with the inexplicable exception of the year 1900, science fiction made up a conspicuous portion of the editorial content.

  Though the first science fiction carried by the one-hundred-percent pulp-paper magazine was a socially advanced new short story, Citizen 504, by Charles H. Palmer (December, 1896), cautioning against the dangers of a highly regimented society, a substantial percentage of all the stories during the first few years were reprints. Many were from THE DAILY CONTINENT, the short-lived newspaper published by Munsey from February 1 to June 7, 1891; others were from MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE and a good number from GOLDEN ARGOSY and THE ARGOSY. Among the reprints were science-fiction novels of some merit. A Month in the Moon, by Andre Laurie (Paschall Grousselt), a well-told story of gigantic magnets which pull the moon down to the surface of the Sahara Desert, appeared in eight monthly installments, February-September, 1897. Its original appearance in America was as The Conquest of the Moon in seventeen weekly installments in THE ARGOSY, November 16, 1889-March 8, 1890. Previous to that, it had been an outstanding seller in hardcovers in France and England. It was serialized in England's THE BOY'S OWN PAPER in thirty-six installments, January 19-September 21, 1889, as A Marvelous Conquest: A Story of the Bayouda.

  Not as imaginative, but still one of the most thrilling serials to appear, was William Murray Graydon's The River of Darkness in THE ARGOSY, May-November, 1897, in which a group of explorers is carried hundreds of miles under Africa by the current of a submerged river to a subterranean lake inhabited by monstrous serpents of an unknown variety. The novel originally appeared in GOLDEN ARGOSY, July 19-October 18, 1890, as Under Africa; or, The Strange Manuscript of the White Slave. It was also reprinted as a paperback book by the U.S. Book Company. A sequel, Over Africa, Captives of the Red City, took the readers to the skies, like Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon, and was published in THE DAILY CONTINENT, February 1, 1891. William Murray Graydon was a most unusual writer. He was born in Harrisburg, Pa., lived in England, and, before his death April 5, 1946, wrote 269 Sexton Blake detective novels, spread over the period 1904 to 1930. His son, Robert Murray Graydon, in addition to many Sexton Blake stories of his own, wrote a series of science-fiction novels under the pen name of Murray Roberts for MODERN BOY (England) built around the exploits of a flying superman Captain Justice. He died in 1937. Another significant serial was The Golden Deluge (June-October, 1897), by Otto M. Moeller, which, from internal evidence appears almost certainly to be a translation from the German and tells in synoptic form of the invention of a method for manufacturing gold, of the breakdown of the monetary system, of a war that wipes out half of humanity, and of a new world currency based on land value. The story ends in 1923 with an element of Utopia emerging from the shambles.

  It should be noted that during the four months of June, July, August, and September, 1897, the three science-fiction novels discussed—A Month in the Moon, The River of Darkness, and The Gold Deluge—ran concurrently. In addition to the serials, there were four other short stories and novelettes of science fiction that year.

  There was no science fiction of any importance during 1898, but in 1899, THE ARGOSY more than made up for it, serializing A Queen of Atlantis, by Frank Aubrey (February-August), who had enjoyed an international best-seller in 1897 with The Devil Tree of El Dorado. A unifying character of both books is Monella, a two-thousand-year-old son of Manoa, the legendary city of the Spaniards upon which Edgar Allan Poe based his poem El Dorado. In A Queen of Atlantis, the remnants of the Atlantean civilization is discovered on an island in the Sargasso Sea. Vampires and elf people play a part in this book, though it nevertheless manages to remain science fiction. Chronologically, A Queen of Atlantis precedes The Devil Tree of El Dorado.

  It is of parenthetical interest to note that Upton Sinclair's novel of the Italian Renaissance, In the Net of the Visconti, was serialized in 1899.

  Beyond the Great South Wall (September-February) was another bell ringer for 1899 which attained hardcovers. A great barrier wall is found to seal the antarctic from the outside world. Swept by a storm through a passage to the other side, a group of explorers finds that ancient Mayans had migrated there and dinosaurs still live in that unknown land.

  During these years THE ARGOSY used no pictures on the cover, but in that space, made crude printed appeals for readership. Occasionally they featured single story titles, and Beyond the South Wall received such treatment, as did a number of the major science-fiction novels, before and after.

  The big novel for 1901, At Land's End (May-November), was an exciting story of the exploration of the arctic by airplane. Since there were no airplanes then, Jared L. Fuller's effort was bona-fide science fiction.

  The Land of the Central Sun (July, 1902-January, 1903) told of a world inside the earth, heated by the molten core suspended in the center, as in Edgar Rice Burroughs' later At the Earth's Core, with opposing civilizations and fierce wars. The reprint of The Lake of Gold (December 1902-July, 1903), by British author George Griffith, whose sales of science-fiction novels would exceed those of H. G. Wells in hardcover, was the only appearance of that fabulously popular author in a magazine edited in the United States. It involves the discovery of a lake of pure gold, which find finances the building of airplanes, submarines, and battle ships which effect the conquest of Europe by the United States.

  William Wallace Cook was a pen name for W. B. Lawson, who had first gained notice as a dime-novel writer of considerable competence, particularly for the Street & Smith publications. When dime-novel work became erratic, he submitted fiction to Matthew White, Jr., editor of THE ARGOSY since 1889. THE ARGOSY became the stabilizing influence on his finances, and among the many novels of his they published was A Round Trip to the Year 2000 (July-November, 1903). Cook wrote smoothly, but with tongue in cheek. He was a satirist, and as his characters move one hundred years forward into the year 2000, they deal with sociological extensions of their times, which makes this novel well worth serious study. The revolt of the mech
anical robots (the Muglugs) precedes Karel Capek by seventeen years. Had Cook been a more literary writer, the term "robot" would never have become popular and an automatic working device might today be called a "muglug." Nine years later THE ARGOSY would run a sequel, Castaways of the Year 2000 (October, 1912-January, 1913), which enjoyed considerable popularity and contained significant social criticism despite its lighthearted mood.

  During the years 1903 to 1907 William Wallace Cook was undoubtedly the leading writer of science fiction for THE ARGOSY, contributing Castaway at the Pole (March, 1904), The Blue Peter Troglydyte (August, 1904), Adrift in the Unknown (December, 1904-April, 1905), Marooned in 1492 (August-December, 1905), and The Eighth Wonder (November, 1906-February, 1907). One thing Cook's stories had in common. Whether they dealt with a trip to the future, a journey to the past, space passage to the planet Mercury, a lost civilization at the poles, or a plan to stop the rotation of the earth, they were concerned with the betterment of society. Five of his science-fiction novels were later reprinted in paperback in the Adventure Library published by Street & Smith in the twenties. They are today badly dated, contain questionable science, were hastily conceived, but are still easy to read and imaginative enough to make understandable why, for a brief period, they were so popular.

  There were two years when THE ARGOSY ran no science fiction except the conclusion of a serial begun the previous year. Those were 1898 and 1900. Such a notable omission may have been sheer coincidence, or it might have had some relationship to the appearance of H. G. Wells' great fantastic novels in the United States. The War of the Worlds was serialized in COSMOPOLITAN in May-December, 1897, and The First Men in the Moon in November, 1900-June, 1901; and both scored a veritable publishing sensation.