TARZAN OF THE APES

By Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs created one of the longest-lived and influential of all pulp-action heroes: Tarzan is not just a character, he is modern myth. The novel tells of how the Greystokes were shipwrecked on a remote African shore and slain by a ferocious man-eating “Great Ape” (a species Burroughs created, he knew real gorillas didn’t fit the bill for his story). Only little baby Greystoke survives, adopted by one of the she-apes. He grows to manhood as Tarzan, the fiercest beast and cleverest man in the jungle.

ERB’s novel is ferociously un-PC, some might even say offensively racist (some, post-modern literary critics, have). ERB’s world is explicitly Darwinian, both in nature and society. It is also laden with any number of crazy contrivances (even my teen-age eyes, dazzled by derring-do, found the way Tarzan learns to read to be a stretch) and wacky coincidences (evidently lots of folks get shipwrecked on this one stretch of African coast, they might even be related). But lord-a-mercy, this novel has adventure! Tarzan gets to do, if not all, many of the things that nice boys in dull American suburbs don’t get to do. He is a wild-man, like Enkidu of ancient Sumer, savage and heroic at the same time.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

TARZAN THE LOST ADVENTURE
By Edgar Rice Burroughs and Joe R. Lansdale

ERB was a thorough writer. He left behind little in the way of unfinished manuscripts, but he did leave one. In 1995 Joe Lansdale turned that partially completed tale into a full novel. The result is perhaps more Lansdale than Burroughs, something that may grieve some, but frankly I find Lansdlae’s contributions highly entertaining.

While I am not normally a fan of pastiches, I liked Tarzan The Lost Adventure. I’ve got admit up front that I’m more of a Lansdale fan than an ERB fan. So reading a Tarzan tale told with the distinctive Texas twang of Lansdale is my idea of a good time.

Lansdale’s Tarzan is a man sick of civilization, but unable to completely distance himself from it. Like a gunfighter who’s outlived the wildness of the West, Tarzan is just a bit unsure of himself. Not too unsure of himself though, give him a Cape Buffalo to wrestle or some bad guys to liquidate and he is in top form.

Prof. Hanson of the University of Texas is looking for anthropoid apes and a lost city in the jungle. He is accompanied by his daughter Jean and has a supporting expedition led by a pair of bumbling grad students. But also on the trail are a band of murderous cutthroats, deserters from the Foreign Legion. The jungle holds even greater dangers than outlaws.

This supporting cast is well developed. The outlaws and the bearers are men with personalities, not just extras around to hold a gun or tote a box. Tarzan is not the only character to show heroism, the spear bearers can rise to the occasion as well. Tarzan’s animal comrades Jad-bal-ja the lion and Nkima the monkey are essential parts of the tale.

The Lost Adventure is a bit of a curio cabinet of Texana and even martial arts oddities. It is also a rich field for the Texas banter that Lansdale writes with such verve.

Hunt said, “You speak to lions and monkeys?”
“Yes,” Tarzan said. “I find they have to be spoken to. Neither can read notes.”

Or:

“Have it your way, Bwana,” Billy said. “But I tell you this. Lots of wind. Lots of rain. Whip you to pieces. Twist you like rope, tie you in a knot. Throw stuff the wind whip does. Throws straw through trees. Makes elephant and hippo cower in fear. Not make Billy feel all so good neither.”

Some reviewers have focussed on Lansdale’s ending and plot points that were not resolved satisfactorily. Perhaps, but for me the fast-paced sweep of the story kept me hooked till the end. Now if there is never another Tarzan sequel ever written by anybody, I won’t feel cheated. ERB said plenty with his character, and he said it well without the need of any help. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t thoroughly enjoy this one time Joe Lansdale told a Tarzan story.

-Dave Hardy

TARZAN THE APE MAN
Dir. by W.S. van Dyke

While it was not the first Tarzan movie, the 1932 film featuring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan is the definitive one.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ vision of his ape-man was a sharply defined one: he was a scion of English nobility, reared by apes and possessed of their savage ferocity, but tempered with the cunning of a high intellect. He was also a cultivated gentleman who taught himself to read with a picture dictionary and spoke English, French, and whatever native dialects the plot called for.

MGM didn’t give a bankruptcy lawyer’s butt about all that. They found the best-looking athlete they could. To avoid the obvious problem that he wasn’t really an actor they didn’t give him any lines. For Jane they got a young Irish actress who was gorgeous and let you know she could handle angry hippos, hostile pygmies, and amorous ape-man. The result wasn’t ERB’s Tarzan but it was silver-screen history.

Jane Parker (Maureen O’Sullivan)arrives in Africa to meet her father at his trading post. Along with his handsome assistant Harry (Niel Hamilton), Old Parker (C. Aubrey Smith) is about to set off to find the fabled Elephant’s Graveyard. But on the way they encounter hostile natives and a strange white man living with the apes. That white man is none other than Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) who abruptly departs with the beautiful Jane.

Jungle romance blossoms, but not until after Jane narrowly averts a Fate Worse than Death (a common problem for ERB heroines, though usually at the hands of a villain, the script here is honest enough to admit that a chap raised by apes might need a bit of sorting out in the gentlemanliness line). She is restored to her folks after the loutish Harry pots Tarzan’s step-sister (she’s an ape, but still kin).

The expedition survives some brutal attacks by Tarzan (an echo of his long war with the Gomangani depicted in Tarzan of the Apes and Jungle Tales of Tarzan). Things really get hot when the explorers are captured by pygmies (“Are they pygmies?” asks Jane. “No, they’re dwarves.” Replies the insightful Harry). Only Tarzan, who must balance his hate for the intruders against his love for Jane can save the day.

This is the stuff of a boy’s Saturday afternoon dreams. By modern standards the film is pretty much politically incorrect, but it’s a waste of time trying to sort out the irreductablility of the privileged gaze from the Center on the (re)colonized Other of the subject(ified) periphery in a discourse that privileges the, oh never mind. It’s got charging elephants! And a gorilla! And Tarzan saying, “Tarzan! Jane! Tarzan! Jane!” What more can you ask for?

-Dave Hardy

JUNGLE TALES OF TARZAN
By Edgar Rice Burroughs

Everybody’s favorite jungle boy wasn’t always an elegant English earl. In fact, in his younger days he was pretty much a wild man, frankly he was a real animal. I suppose that’s how it is when you live with a bunch of apes.

Jungle Tales of Tarzan details Tarzan’s youthful exploits in the jungles of Africa. He learns about love and wonders why every animal has a mate except him. He develops his own religion with ideas about God and what kind of animal the moon is. Tarzan analyzes himself as a Mangani, an ape, that is a person without qualifications, in relation to the Gomangani, the black people, and the Tarmangani, the white people of his imagination. And he has rip-roaring battles with ferocious beasts: lions, hyenas, leopards, and enraged bull apes.

Tarzan has quite a few battles with the jungle’s most dangerous beast: man. This is where the Tarzan tales hit the pavement of the 21st century. Modern readers may find Tarzan’s almost psychopathic savagery toward the Gomangani to be a bit difficult to swallow. Sure, Tarzan adopts a black boy for a while. The adoption is more like a prolonged kidnapping with the poor kid’s terrified reaction formally laid out by ERB, in an ironic counterpoint to Tarzan’s enthusiastic attempt at building a multi-racial (technically inter-species, Tarzan is an APE by adoption) family. But ERB also drops enough lines about the innate inferiority of blacks to make this an uncomfortable read. The irony is that I read it directly after The Sky and the Forest and I found Burroughs’ African to be more fully-realized characters than Forester’s. ERB credits his Africans with abstract thinking!

Anyway, I really don’t want to sound like a pompous, white, 21st century liberal scoring easy points off ERB. The fact is he was a master of fast-paced action, capable of a bit of deft characterization and even a bit of irony at the expense of his most famous character. I’ll leave a larger discussion of racism in pulp-fiction to others more qualified than myself. But I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say that 21st century readers are likely to find the racial attitude unpleasing. Just call me a Tarmangani for reconciliation.

-Dave Hardy

TARZAN FOREVER
By John Taliaferro

If there was one guy who could claim to have single-handedly invented pulp fiction it is Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose fictional creations have dominated the daydreams of generations of boys since 1913. John Taliaferro sets out to tell the story of the man behind Tarzan, John Carter, Carson Napier, Davis Innes, and a host of daring heroes in all the remotest places of the Earth and beyond.

Taliaferro balances his view of ERB the man with ERB the writer. But both are weighed against ERB the businessman. Talliaferro notes that ERB’s first book, A Princess of Mars, was written mostly as a release from the boredom of life as an unsuccessful businessman. But ERB was always cognizant that writing was a paying proposition. While ERB was a pretty good businessman for a writer, he was perhaps not a very good businessman overall.

Taliaferro depicts a man that is something of a prisoner of his own success. Having adopted a lifestyle that required a high cash flow ERB was forced to write quickly and stick to characters that would sell. ERB had little time to spend on polishing his work and developing new skills as a writer. When new characters and attempts at new genres didn’t pan out, ERB returned to writing Tarzan to make sales. The result was a body of work that started out as ground-breaking, but ended up by becoming repetitious.

ERB pioneered marketing a character with promotional tie-ins. In way that has become the norm now, the name of Tarzan appeared on toys, clothing, ice-cream, and even gasoline.

Some may find Taliaferro’s literary criticism heavy-handed. If ERB’s series tended to become repetitious, he worked earnestly to create new characters and to broaden his fictional horizons. ERB even dabbled in metafictional conceits such as having Tarzan confront his own movie popularity. Admittedly, Taliaferro chalks this up to an urge to get even with movie-makers that ERB felt hadn’t done justice to his creation. Still, the very notion of a fictional character observing himself translated into film is practically a post-modern novelist’s dream (are your listening Umberto Eco?).

Even more controversial will be Taliaferro on the racist themes and pro-eugenics propaganda that he finds in ERB’s work. While it would be foolish to deny that ERB would have benefited from a more relaxed perspective, readers may wish to make up their own minds on the subject.

Tarzan Forever is probably not the definitive biography of ERB, but its good enough to make its subject come alive and get the pulse pounding at the thought of reading some of those grand old adventure yarns that have held the imagination for decades.

-Dave Hardy