1940 In response to financial difficulties, Burroughs and his family move to Hawaii.
1941 Florence leaves Edgar, who consequently suffers from ill health and depression; the two divorce. He witnesses the attack on Pearl Harbor, and later becomes a columnist for the Honolulu Advertiser.
1942 Burroughs becomes a war correspondent in the South Pacific.
1945 George Orwell’s Animal Farm appears.
1949 After years of ill health, Burroughs suffers a massive heart attack.
1950 On March 19 Edgar Rice Burroughs dies in Encino, California, while reading the Sunday comics; he is buried in Tarzana.
INTRODUCTION
It’s a Man’s World
Tarzan, like Peter Pan before him, has taken flight from the pages of a book to become a character with a life apart, the life of an icon, someone everybody knows. Tarzan, like a figure of folklore, seems to have emerged from our collective imagination, not the mind of a single author. But Tarzan is the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had considered calling him Zartan or Tublat-Zan. Tarzan was born here, in this novel that was first published in The All-Story, a pulp-fiction magazine, in October 1912.
Tarzan of the Apes is a book full of surprises. It is a compendium of pseudo-scientific ideas from the early decades of the twentieth century, theories of white racial superiority and also of the degeneracy of the white race through over-civilization, ideas about the inheritance of learned traits, and, indirectly, about creating a superior race through “breeding” and forced sterilization. It is also a work of stupendous popular appeal, packed with immediate, intense gratification. A male answer to the female romance novel, it is a fantasy of dominance and potency written with complete abandon. Here is fantasy super-sized, offering Americans their very first superhero, and perhaps their first experience of becoming part of an audience engaged in mass identification, the kind of experience we have since grown accustomed to in the movies.
Tarzan’s idealized manhood speaks directly to a recognizable daydream of what would happen if one could shed civilization, along with the demoralizing, inhibiting, and feminizing forces of domesticity and modern living. Tarzan appeals to the feeling that, like Clark Kent, Superman’s alter-ego, all men have a Tarzan hidden under their everyday facades. Tarzan knows only freedom and autonomy. Having nobody to please but himself, he is exuberantly unencumbered by responsibilities, mundane obligations, opposing opinions, and the ambivalence produced by reflection. Tarzan makes ruthlessness look good. Living by his wits and brute strength, he experiences the masculine authenticity that modern life deprives men of.
Tarzan of the Apes was a runaway success when it first appeared. Before he knew it, Burroughs had created a Tarzan industry. He struck deals for daily Tarzan newspaper comic strips and movies (and, later, radio shows), and he licensed Tarzan statuettes, Tarzan bubble gum, Tarzan bathing suits, and an assortment of other merchandizing ventures. Burroughs would write twenty-three Tarzan sequels, and estimates of his lifetime sales range between 30 and 60 million books.
With all the enthusiasm came detractors, those who said Tarzan was unoriginal, his hero just a variation on Kipling’s Mowgli, who, in The Jungle Books, is adopted as an infant by wolves. Kipling himself was of this opinion, writing in his autobiography, “If it be in your power, bear serenely with imitators. My Jungle Book begot Zoos of them. But the genius of all genii was the 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” (Something of Myself, p. 237; see “For Further Reading’).
In some respects, Tarzan is a distant descendant of frontier legends such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and James Fenimore Cooper’s character Hawkeye. Tarzan follows the tradition of frontier stories in which white heroes achieve their full manhood by emulating the ways of Indian hunters and warriors, of “savages.” In Tarzan of the Apes, the frontier is replaced by the jungle, and the “savages” are apes and Africans instead of Indians. Like the pioneer heroes, Tarzan symbolically merges the skill and ferocity of the savage with the superior mental and moral acuity attributed to the “civilized” man. Richard Slotkin has argued that the false values of “the metropolis,” be it European culture or urban modernity, can be purged by the adoption of a more primitive and natural condition of life, by a crossing of the border from civilization to wilderness. But adopting the ways of the beast or “savage” does not mean becoming one; it means you know how to turn his own methods against him.
Critic Leslie Fiedler described Tarzan of the Apes as “that immortal myth of the abandoned child of civilization who survives to become Lord of the Jungle.” This basic plot has been adapted and readapted in several dozen film versions. There are many Tarzans; there are noble savages, simple and gentle guardians who protect the jungle and its creatures from arrogant but frightened jungle-intruders, and there are fierce fighting Tarzans, whose primitive existence is poignantly harsh and brutal. Specific features of the Tarzan that Burroughs created, however, are commonly omitted from adaptations; rarely is he represented as the son of an English lord and lady who teaches himself to read and who demonstrates, through his demeanor and skill at killing, his Anglo-Saxon “racial superiority” and his inherited aristocratic taste and sense of honor. These elements of the story don’t have the kind of appeal they once did. As early as the first sound film adaptation in 1932, Hollywood democratized Tarzan, taking away his title and his British heritage. Over the years the representations of Tarzan’s Africa have varied as well. In many of the films, including the 1999 Disney animated version, no Africans appear at all, nor does Tarzan employ his method of killing by hanging, an evocation of lynching that, dismayingly, Burroughs seems to have been untroubled by. Because we want our heroes to embody our principles, Tarzan continues to evolve.
THE ARTISTRY OF ESCAPE
Edgar Rice Burroughs, one of the first authors to incorporate himself, did not associate authorship with literary art but with entertainment and, specifically, with escapism. Over the years Burroughs gave many different answers to the question of how he came up with the idea for Tarzan. He often spoke of his discontent with the life he was leading at the time he wrote Tarzan of the Apes. “Tarzan was, in a sense my escape from unpleasant reality. Perhaps that is the reason for his success with modern readers. Maybe he takes them, too, away from humdrum reality” (Porges, Edgar Rice Burroughs, p. 134). In his mid-thirties, married with two children, Burroughs was living in Chicago, working for a business magazine called System after having tried several different approaches to making a living, from being a railroad cop chasing hobos to an office manager at Sears, Roebuck. As a boy Eddie Burroughs had an altogether more romantic image of what manhood would be like. While many of his friends from military school went off to East Coast colleges, he sought admission to West Point but was unable to pass the qualifying exam. In 1896 he enlisted as a common soldier and was assigned to the Seventh Cavalry at Fort Grant in the Arizona Territory. The regiment had fought under Custer at the Little Bighorn and massacred the Lakota at Wounded Knee; more recently, it had been called on to “quell” the 1894 Pullman strike in Chicago.
Life at Fort Grant, however, was not what Burroughs expected. The fort was in disrepair, most of the soldiers were foreign-born, the only Indians he ever got close to were the army’s Apache scouts, and his hopes of becoming an officer were dashed when he learned that a minor heart condition made him ineligible to receive a commission. He and a handful of other soldiers who came from “better” families organized The May Have Seen Better Days Club, which met in Burroughs’s quarters, where they drank wine and presumably imagined themselves elsewhere. Ten months into Burroughs’s enlistment his father pulled strings to have him discharged. Upon returning to Chicago, he took a position at his father’s firm, the American Battery Company. When war with Spain was declared in 1898, Burroughs again sought to experience real ma
nhood. He quit his job and applied to join the Rough Riders, but again he was disappointed when Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt replied that the regiment was “overenlisted.” Manhood was not living up to Burroughs’s expectations, and for the next several years, he drifted from job to job, soon taking his new bride, Emma, with him.
Years later Burroughs indicated that even becoming a successful writer did not fulfill him. “I was sort of ashamed of it as an occupation for a big, strong, healthy man” (Taliaferro, Tarzan Forever, p.16). But if he couldn’t live the manly life, he certainly could imagine it. In 1932, in “The Tarzan Theme,” he mused: “We wish to escape not alone the narrow confines of city streets for the freedom of the wilderness, but the restrictions of man-made laws, and the inhibitions that society has placed upon us. We like to picture ourselves as roaming free, the lords of ourselves and of our world; in other words, we would each like to be Tarzan. At least I would: I admit it.” Burroughs’s fantasies of escape are tied to his fantasies of dominance. He wanted to escape to a world he could command. His capacity to use his imagination to construct worlds into which he could temporarily retreat was prodigious; besides the Tarzan series, he wrote eleven novels set on Mars, five on Venus, and six located in a realm called Pellucidor, located at the center of Earth. Perhaps even more remarkable was his ease at sharing his escapist fantasies with the public. Gore Vidal called Burroughs an “archetypal American dreamer,” by which he meant daydreamer. In his essay “Tarzan Revisited,” Vidal writes, “There are so many things that people who take polls never get around to asking. For instance, how many adults have an adventure serial running in their heads?”
Americans do have a great aptitude for daydreaming, even a genius for it, as our mass entertainment industry, the largest and most lucrative in the world, attests to. In 1911, when Burroughs was getting started as a writer, movies were in their early phase, not yet big business. Popular fiction had begun to be published cheaply in the 1840s, but it was in the 1870s that “dime novels” became highly profitable. Marketed to boys and young men, they were predominantly Westerns, sensationalized stories of Billy the Kid, Jesse and Frank James, Deadwood Dick, and Calamity Jane. At the turn of the twentieth century dime novels were largely supplanted by pulp magazines, so called because they were printed on unfinished wood-pulp paper. The pulps had color covers, and they built their readership by appealing to specific tastes. Besides offering romances of all kinds for women readers, they developed a range of male fantasy subgenres, so that Wild West stories were divided among magazines that specialized in stories about ranching, mining, or life along the Mexican border; there were detective stories and “secret service” stories, sea stories, foreign exploration stories, pirate stories, and, following the success of Tarzan of the Apes, jungle stories. The pulp magazine industry employed hundreds of writers and produced about 20 million copies a month. Burroughs saw an opportunity, and he surely knew what pulp readers were looking for.
One of the striking features of these daydream-like pulp fiction stories is that they are completely formulaic. They follow a limited number of lines of action, characters are constructed to unambiguously evoke positive or negative feelings, and the reader knows who will triumph in the end. Critic John Cawelti observed that the artistry of formulaic literature involves the creator’s ability to plunge us into feelings of suspense while, at the same time, maintaining our confidence that things will work out as we want them to. This formulaic element of popular fiction distinguishes it from literary art in which authors strive for originality of form and structure. In genre writing, artfulness involves tight control of the form’s conventions, an ability to work within them while still surprising the reader. The fondness with which readers recall their boyhood encounter with the Lord of the Jungle—Fiedler describes having been “near tears when I finished the last volume”—and the devotion of Burroughs’s current fans affirm that in Tarzan, Burroughs created a character who can contain ideas of masculinity suited to many ages. As aristocrat, avenger, savior, gentleman, and master of jungle lore, he is a perfect, inexhaustible vehicle for the adventure genre.
In the 1920s and 1930s the pulps would eventually produce original stylists such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, whose works gave us a distinctive diction and a range of memorable characters and settings. Burroughs had a fertile imagination—later in the series, Tarzan, now a grandfather, shares adventures with people a foot high, with descendents of Atlantis, and with Roman legionnaires who don’t know that the Empire has fallen—but his command of literary techniques was limited. He is recognized for his ability to describe action with pacing and precision, but his dialogue is stiff and stagy, his characters are rarely developed beyond their type, and when they are they often become incomprehensibly inconsistent. (One example in Tarzan of the Apes is Professor Porter, who changes from a crude comic figure to a dignified worried father during Jane’s abduction, and who then, near the end of the book, barters his daughter’s hand in marriage.) In twenty-four Tarzan novels, the hero is the only memorable character—with the exception perhaps of Tantor the elephant.
The difference between literary art and formula fiction can be compared to that between imagination and fantasy. Formula fiction works on the principle of wish-fulfillment, providing stories that present quick, potent resolutions to dilemmas while dispelling anxiety and denying ambivalence. In this fantasy world there are no opposing desires, certainly no internal conflicts or moral quandaries. When Tarzan’s rearing by apes comes into tension with his hereditary human instincts, such as when he considers eating the flesh of his first human victim or when he has Jane within his power, heredity wins out without a struggle, and we learn that Tarzan has no cannibalistic urges and that he possesses an innate chivalry. Imagination, in contrast, is, well, something else again.
BURROUGHS’S AMERICA
First in violence, deepest in dirt, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the “tough” among cities, a spectacle for the nation.
—Lincoln Steffens on Chicago in The Shame of the Cities (1904)
Perhaps the fact that I lived in Chicago and yet hated cities and crowds of people made me write my first Tarzan story.
—Edgar Rice Burroughs
Burroughs was born in 1875 in Chicago, the city where many of the nation’s triumphs and troubles seemed most manifest then and in the decades to follow. He was the youngest of four brothers, sons of a former major in the Union Army who had become a successful businessman. Chicago, like many major American cities in this period, was experiencing massive industrialization that changed the look and smell of the city, while the arrival of immigrants to take low-paying industrial jobs changed its character. Strife between labor and capital, including major railroad strikes in 1877 and 1894, increased public fear of foreign-born “rabble-rousers.” A significant number of middle-class, white, native-born Protestant Americans perceived Chicago as a degraded contrast to everything their ancestors stood for. The 1900 census reported that more than one-third of all Chicagoans were born abroad, and the famous illustrator Frederic Remington called for the city’s redemption from the “malodorous crowd of anarchistic foreign trash.” In 1886 the Haymarket Riots, a bloody confrontation between striking workers and police, led to the execution of four labor leaders; one of the official witnesses to the hangings was Burroughs’s father.
Seven years later the surviving codefendants were pardoned by Governor John Altgeld, who acknowledged that their trial had been unfair and prejudiced, and a monument was erected to the “Haymarket Martyrs.” In the same year, Chicago unveiled its “neoclassical wonderland,” the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Exposition was divided into two racially specific areas: the White City, depicting the advances of civilization, and the Midway Plaisance, displaying the “barbarism” of the dark races. The Midway was lined with “villages” of Samoans, Egyptians, Turks, American Indians, and other “exotic primitive peoples,” all transported from th
eir homelands for the event. In a merger of ethnography, “freak show,” and vaudeville, the “natives” performed dances for the American public. The Chicago Tribune observed, “What an opportunity was here afforded to the scientific mind to descend the spiral of evolution, tracing humanity in its highest phases down almost to its animalistic origins” (quoted in Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, p. 35). By contrast, the White City celebrated the world of commerce and featured the latest technological advances, such as dynamos and rock drills. The American Battery Company, where Burroughs’s father worked, had a display there. Eddie, now eighteen years old, was given the exciting job of driving a battery-powered car around the Midway, providing him with the opportunity to speed around the exhibits of “primitive peoples,” visit Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, and witness the daily reenactment of General Custer’s “Last Stand.”
Although the exposition celebrated the power and superiority of white manhood, it could not stem the growing anxiety with which many white men viewed the future. Books about “race suicide” and the “passing of the great race” became national best-sellers. Theodore Roosevelt urged all white American families to have at least four children in order to match the reproductive rates of inferior nations. Other figures, more prejudiced than Roosevelt, weighed in on the peril facing white Protestant Americans with formulations full of fear and hate. Frederic Remington shared his thoughts in a letter to his friend, the author Owen Wister: “Jews, Injuns, Chinamen, Italians, Huns—the rubbish of the earth I hate—I’ve got some Winchesters and when the massacring begins, I can get my share of’em, and what’s more I will” (see Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 97). Burroughs would write in 1914 that the greatest gift his parents had given their children was “the red blood of the Puritan and the Pioneer, bequeathed ... uncontaminated.” Proud of his “nearly pure” Anglo-Saxon lineage, he became a committed proponent of eugenics, a “science” aimed at purifying the national “germ plasm” (gene pool), in order to eliminate “lower types,” ranging from “imbeciles” to racial inferiors. In the United States this movement brought about the passage of laws in thirty states that eventually resulted in the sterilization of 60,000 Americans, half of them in the state of California.
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