The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer
Part 3: Edgar Rice Burroughs

First published in Phlogiston Thirty, January 1992.

They say you always remember the big world-shattering events. You remember where you were and what you were doing. Well it’s not true. Intellectually I know that Kennedy was assassinated, that Buddy Holly’s aeroplane crashed, that the Cuban missile crisis almost plunged the world into nuclear war—but I don’t remember any of them. I just know.

However I do remember when I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I’d not long been a member of the adult library (it took all my powers of persuasion, I was far too young and the librarian was dubious). I was browsing through the shelves and I came across a rather strange looking book. The dust cover across the spine (which was all I could see) was pure white (quite a contrast to the multicoloured spines that surrounded it), and in pale blue letters it said “A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs”. Odd. It looked so innocuous compared to the other books. Something made me take it down and look at it, and I was immediately rewarded. The front cover showed a garish picture of a green, multiarmed thing brandishing a sword. Oh Wow! It hit me right where I lived—I had to read this book. So I took it home and from the first sentence, I was an addict for life.

I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect, I have always been a man, a man about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that someday I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.

Who could resist an opening like that? I certainly couldn’t.

Running from Apache Indians, his partner dead, John Carter takes refuge in a cave. He is overcome by a vapour seeping from the back of the cave. A low distinct moaning fills the air and the pursuing Indians flee in terror from whatever it is that inhabits this strange cave. Carter himself is overcome with fear, but is unable to move. The gas appears to have paralysed him. Making a supreme effort, he exercises all his will—and suddenly he is standing naked looking down at his seemingly dead body. Fearful of exploring the cave, he leaves and wanders out into the Arizona night. He reaches yearning arms to the stars, almost praying, and his eye is caught by Mars, the red planet, God of war. Immediately he feels an almost magnetic attraction, and he is drawn up through the vast reaches of space by mysterious Blavatskian mechanisms. When next he opens his eyes, he is on Mars—Barsoom.

For the first time I roamed the dead sea bottoms of Barsoom in the company of John Carter, Dejah Thoris—his Martian princess, and Tars Tarkas, the green monster who had first attracted me to the book. I came back to those dead seas many times over the years. I swung through the upper reaches of the jungle with Tarzan, I journeyed to Pellucidar with David Innes and to Venus with Carson Napier. And it was all a wild and woolly journey and the fever of it has never ceased to burn in me. Even now, after all these years, it makes me tingle. Edgar Rice Burroughs really hit the spot.

He himself was an archetypal failure. He fancied that he was something of an entrepreneur and he started business after business. They all failed. He was poor and starving. He had a wife and a child. He had even had to sink so low as to pawn his wife’s jewellery to feed his family (I know it is a cliched situation—but he did it!). One day, in his office, surrounded by the letterheads of failed businesses and watching another one die, he stacked some of the waste paper together and on it, out of sheer desperation, he began to write something he tentatively titled My First Adventure on Mars. Later he scratched it out and inserted The Green Martians. This too he did not like. He tried again—Dejah Thoris, Martian Princess. Not bad—it would do for now. Under the title he scribbled a nom-de-plume: By Normal Bean. Perhaps this was a measure of his insecurity, a desire to emphasise that despite the fantastic settings of the strange tale he was telling, he was really, under the skin, just as normal, just as human and you and me. He wished to stress how ordinary, how mundane he was.

Amazingly, he stuck to it and finished the story. He submitted it to All-Story magazine for no very good reason other than that he had read and enjoyed some stories in the magazine in the past. Rather to his surprise, it was accepted (subject to a few changes—editors can’t help but suggest changes) and it was published in February 1912 with the title Under the Moons of Mars. Infuriatingly, the typesetter for the issue refused to believe that anybody could be called “Normal Bean” and unilaterally changed Burroughs’ pseudonym to Norman Bean, much to Burroughs’ disgust. In a letter to the editor enclosing a new manuscript he noted:

…I have used my own name as author. I have done this because what little value was attached to my “trade” name was rendered nil by the inspired compositor who misspelled it…

This next novel was called The Outlaw of Torn. It was a semi-historical novel set in the time of Henry III. He had great difficulty getting the story published (it didn’t actually see the light of day until 1927. It is still seldom seen, mainly because it’s rotten). Burroughs paid little attention to that, however, because late in 1911 he began work on a novel with a plot so outrageous and engrossing that he could not leave it alone. The words flew like magic across the page. The story was fully shaped in his mind. He called it Tarzan of the Apes.

Once again, he opened it with lines of magic prose. Who in the world could resist a tale that begins like this:

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own sceptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.

He goes on to tell the tale of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke and his wife marooned on the coast of Africa. Of the child she bore and how she died and how John Clayton himself died when the great apes attacked his cabin as he lay grieving for his dead wife. The child was taken by the apes and raised as one of their own. They called him Tarzan (“white skin”) and he grew to maturity knowing no other family but the apes…

The story was published in All-Story magazine in October 1912, and with it Burroughs’ career took off like a rocket. The novel was published in book form in 1914 by A. C. McClurg & Co. and in one edition or another it has remained in print ever since. His first novel, with the new title A Princess of Mars was published in 1917, again by A. C. McClurg & Co. It too has never gone out of print.

To read A Princess of Mars with an adult eye is to see a quite astonishing progress. As the book moves forward, you can actually see Burroughs learning his craft. The hesitant, rambling style of the earlier sections changes and the action becomes crisper. The overly long exposition and explanation give way to dramatic interpretations that tell their own story without the need of lectures. The stilted dialogue begins to flow more naturally as the plot takes wing and flies. In the space of one short novel, Burroughs moved from being a rank amateur to being a fully fledged professional, a master of his craft. It is an astonishing performance (would that some of today’s overblown writers could master it). By the time he came to write Tarzan of the Apes he was completely in control of his medium and the book is a flawless gem. It has a complex plot which is carefully and excitingly told. Burroughs does not put a foot wrong and the book holds you enthralled from the opening paragraph to the final heart-rending scene when Tarzan gives up the woman he loves. Tarzan has just learned that he is the rightful heir to the Greystoke estates—estates which are currently managed by another man. He has to make a choice—if he reveals his true parentage and reclaims his inheritance he could do untold damage to this unsuspecting man’s life.

Here was the man who had Tarzan’s title and Tarzan’s estates and was going to marry the woman whom Tarzan loved—the woman who loved Tarzan. A single word from Tarzan would make a great difference in this man’s life. It would take away his title and his lands and his castles and it would take them away from Jane Porter also…

…“If it’s any of my business, how did you ever get into that bally jungle?”

“I was born there,” said 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.”

Both of these novels spawned sequels. Burroughs would have been perfectly at home in the publishing industry of the 1980s and 1990s where every book you come across seems to be the first novel of a series. He always left a hook at the end so that if the book was a success he could hang another story on to it. The most blatant of these was in The Gods of Mars (the direct sequel to A Princess of Mars). Dejah Thoris (the heroine) and two other women have been imprisoned by the villain in a cell which is on the circumference of a gigantic wheel that takes a year to revolve once upon its axis. The cell is visible for only a short time. Soon the revolution of the wheel will take it out of sight into the hidden chamber through which the wheel revolves. It will not reappear for a year.

…I saw her raise a dagger on high and then I saw another figure. It was Thuvia’s. As the dagger fell toward the unprotected breast of my love, Thuvia was almost between them. A blinding gust of smoke blotted out the tragedy within that fearsome cell—a shriek rang out, a single shriek as the dagger fell. The smoke cleared away but we stood gazing upon a blank wall. The last crevice had closed and for a long year that hideous chamber would retain its secret from the eyes of men.

…whether the assassins dagger reached one fair bosom or another, only time will divulge.

And that is the final sentence in the book. You can almost hear the howl of rage from the readers. What happens next?

Did the dagger hit Thuvia or Dejah Thoris? It was a year before the answer was delivered, and publication of the sequel (The Warlord of Mars) was guaranteed. Everyone wanted to know what happened.

Conversely, the sequel to Tarzan of the Apes (rather boringly called The Return of Tarzan) wrapped up the story nicely. After lots of adventures (in both the jungles of civilised cities and the jungles of Africa) Tarzan reclaims his estates and marries Jane Porter. You could almost say “and they all lived happily ever after”. It was a perfectly finished story and there really seemed to be no more to say. Burroughs had worked the theme out to his satisfaction and would have been content to leave it there. But, like Conan Doyle before him, he was not allowed to leave his most popular hero alone. Tarzan was far too popular for that. For the next thirty years, Tarzan novels kept appearing in an interminable stream, most of them absolutely dire. It was obvious that Burroughs had long since lost all interest in the character. The nadir of the series was probably Tarzan and the Leopard Men (1935) which is unreadably awful. Only a completist could love it. But even in the stream of tripe there were one or two gems. Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924) is a wonderfully clever satire and The Son of Tarzan (1917) and Jungle Tales of Tarzan (1919) are also thoughtful, clever and exciting books. Towards the end of his life, Burroughs seemed to regain interest in the character. Tarzan and the Castaways (1941) and Tarzan and the Foreign Legion (1944) both stand out as excellent works. There is also a touch of humour—Tarzan auditions in Hollywood to play Tarzan in a film. He is rejected as not being the right type. The foreign legion of the title of the last novel refers not to the famous French legion, but rather to a motley crew of Americans, British, Dutch and Indonesians retreating from the invading Japanese army in the jungles of Indonesia during World War II. Tarzan, as Colonel Clayton of the Royal Air Force, is unrecognised by his comrades. Then:

Sudden recognition lighted the eyes of Jerry Lucas. “John Clayton”, he said. “Lord Greystoke—Tarzan of the Apes!” Shrimp’s jaw dropped. “Is dat Johnny Weismuller?” he demanded.

(For those who don’t get the reference, Johnny Weismuller was probably the best of the screen Tarzans. He made a whole series of films in the 1930s and 1940s and most of them still stand up reasonably well.)

When Burroughs died in 1950 he left behind eighty-three manuscript pages of the next Tarzan novel. The book was incomplete and the pages have never been published.

There were many other books—few of which have survived in the popular consciousness. Some of them were in genres other than SF and fantasy. The War Chief (1927), The Bandit of Hell’s Bend (1925), Apache Devil (1937) and The Deputy Sheriff of Commanche County (1940) were very good westerns obviously written from personal experience—Burroughs spent some of his youth in what was left of the “wild west” as a cowboy on the family ranch in Idaho, and briefly in the cavalry where he saw action against the Apache.

The Mucker (1921) is a wild and fast-moving contemporary adventure involving pirates, revolution, shipwreck, murder, mayhem and a few kitchen sinks. A confusing novel that can never quite make up its mind what it is going to be. The Mad King (1926) is a mediocre book which is practically a rewrite of the then-popular Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope. Set in a mythical European kingdom, it has much intrigue, romance and far too many doubles and twin brothers.

I am a Barbarian was published posthumously in 1967. It is a fictionalised biography of the Roman emperor Caligula told by the slave Brittanicus. It is a radical departure from the normal Burroughs book in both style and content—unfortunately it was published only in a limited edition and is virtually impossible to obtain. This is a shame—Richard Lupoff (one of the few critics who has managed to read a copy) claims that it is one of the best things Burroughs ever wrote. If anybody has a copy for sale, I would be willing to pay lots of money for it!

By and large, though, Burroughs was most at home in the fantasy worlds of Venus, Mars, the centre of the earth (Pellucidar) and the impenetrable jungles of Africa. Once, (in Tarzan at the Earth’s Core) he combined two of his series and Tarzan journeyed to Pellucidar with Jason Gridley in an attempt to rescue David Innes (first Emperor of Pellucidar) from the dungeons of the Korsars. The experiment was quite successful—it breathed new life into the Tarzan character and by introducing this new character into Pellucidar he managed to remove some of the staleness from that series as well. The book is one of the highlights of both series.

The idea of taking a character out of his normal surroundings in order to inject new life into the stories about him seems to have appealed to Burroughs. Towards the end of his life he attempted to do the same thing to John Carter, the hero of his Martian stories. Again, the series had become stale and in one of the novelettes published in the posthumous collection John Carter of Mars it is perfectly obvious that Burroughs is about to take the hero off into fresh fields on the moons of Jupiter (which are inhabited, it seems, by skeleton men). Unfortunately these future stories were never written, and all we have are hints.

One of the reasons that Burroughs is so famous is because of all the Hollywood movies and terrible TV series that have been made from the Tarzan books. Few of these films bear any relationship to the character that Burroughs wrote about in his books. The Tarzan of the novels was an English Lord, witty, urbane and erudite. He was fluent in dozens of languages and was equally at home in high society or the primeval jungle. He was happily married to Jane Porter and they had a son called Jack. The Tarzan of the movies, on the other hand, can barely speak English (let alone anything else—“Me Tarzan. You Jane!”), and is not married to Jane. They have a son called Boy who they found in a crashed aeroplane (since they are not married, it is obviously impossible for them to have children by any other means). The screen Tarzan spends much of his time killing fearsome beasts and people and would have no idea how to behave in polite society.

It is the screen Tarzan rather than the book Tarzan who has entered the popular mind—so much so that there have been attempts to ban Tarzan books and comics from children’s libraries on the grounds that they are immoral since Tarzan and Jane live together without being married and are therefore bad role models for impressionable children. All this despite the incontrovertible fact that in the books, Tarzan and Jane are very happily married indeed. Moreover, Jane’s father is a minister and it was he who officiated at their wedding ceremony! Perhaps I am being naive in expecting the critics actually to read the books instead of merely watching the films?

As far as I am aware, the Martian stories have never been filmed and that is a pity. I think that they would make wonderful kung-fu movies! All through the books, John Carter makes much of the fact that the reduced gravity on Mars gives him almost supernatural strength and gymnastic abilities beyond all measure. Indeed, one of the first things he does in the first Martian tale is leap over the head of an opponent (with one bound he was free…). With a skilful director I really do think that the Martian books would sing on the screen. They have romance and action, all of which can be filmed in delicious slow motion to simulate the effects of reduced gravity. And what is more they have reasonably sensible plots (unlike most films of the genre). I am quite serious in this—I am not being sarcastic.

Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950. He died quite alone, lying in bed, reading the comics section of the newspaper. I can’t think of a better way to go. He died very rich and very famous with a myriad of fans all around the world. He was a very prolific writer. Sixty books were published in his lifetime, and another nine were published posthumously. Virtually all are still in print today. Not bad for a failed businessman.

There is a terrible tendency nowadays to sneer at Edgar Rice Burroughs. People call him a hack writer, a product of the pulps catering to the lowest common denominator. They accuse him of hasty, shoddy work, of poor characterisation, bad writing, weak plots. All of these sins can be laid at his door and strong evidence can indeed be produced to back them up. But don’t ever forget this—his two most famous novels have been continuously in print for nearly eighty years; and virtually every English speaking person in the whole of the world knows the name of Tarzan of the Apes. Tarzan is one of the great cultural icons of the twentieth century, way up there at the top of the list with Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. Everybody (everybody) has heard of them.

How long will your favourite writer stay in print? How many people will recognise the names of your favourite heroes and heroines in eighty years time? I think most writers today would give their right word processor to duplicate those feats.