Every human season creates its storyteller. When
the world grows suddenly larger and the old myths shrivel and seem to wither
away, he arrives somehow to tell his tale. If he is a great storyteller,
his story tells all the things the people feel but can never say, not even
to themselves. If he is merely good, he tells only part of the story they
long to hear, and years may pass before another storyteller comes along
to complete the tale.
But great or good, he is always popular -- for however
disguised his story is, however fantastic it may seem, its true subject
is the single one that interests all mankind, Reality. Edgar Rice Burroughs
was a storyteller, and for fifty-seven years he has been one of the most
popular writers on earth. His books sell in the tens of millions. His characters
are known throughout the world, and "Tarzan" has become a universal common
noun. Wholly without literary reputation, his stories endure, perpetually
successful, living beyond changes in literary style and content, in social
behavior, and even in scientific knowledge
-- while the stories of almost every other writer of
Burroughs' generation, serious artist or commercial hack, lie unread and
unreadable.
There is a story in that success. It began in England,
I believe, in 1889.
In 1889 a world was being born, and another was dying.
America had been an independent nation for a hundred and thirteen years.
The Communist Manifesto was forty-one years old. Darwin's theory of evolution
was thirty-one. In England, Queen Victoria still mourned her consort, Prince
Albert, who had died twenty-eight years before. In America, the War Between
the States was twenty-four years past, but it was not forgotten.
Fourteen year old Edgar Rice Burroughs was part of this
new world. Chicago, his birthplace, was a frontier city then, only fifty
years old, bigger and more cosmopolitan than the cities and towns to the
West, but still raw and vital in a way Eastern America no longer knew.
Agricultural trade and industry had established themselves. The arts and
sciences were arriving.
But the influences of the Old World were muted, and the
surging, exuberant drive that was carrying America vest and challenging
the past belonged to America alone. "I still live" became the rallying
cry of Burroughs' first hero, the eternally youthful John Carter -- and
it echoed the hope and determined conviction held by the young America
of Burroughs' boyhood
111
But a world was dying, too, in 1889. The God who had
made kings divine and who had created man in His own image had no answer
to popular democracy or mass revolution or Darwinian evolution.
The British Empire was richer and more powerful than
ever, America was growing and developing in every material way -- but in
England and America the popular songs and poetry were often tragic or merely
gloomy, fictional heroines were pale and consumptive and "spiritual," and
a dark thread of necrophila ran through literature and the drama. The dead,
divine body of the past was helplessly mourned, and the living animal body
of the present was looked upon with loathing. Anything associated with
man's purported animal ancestry was refused social existence. At once a
denial or Darwinism and an agonized acknowledgment, Victorian prudery was
the sure consequence of the trauma created by evolutionary thought. Socially,
women stopped having arms and legs and developed limbs. Poultry acquired
"white meat" and "drumsticks" so that "breast" and "legs" need not be mentioned
in mixed company. The naked legs of furniture were sometimes clad in decorative
trousers. Metaphysically, it was less comic. To be
made of flesh became obscene. No decent woman liked sex.
That was for the beasts. Man had lost his divinity, men knew -- but they
would not accept his animality.
Two years before, H. Rider Haggard, the English author
of the enormously popular King Solomon's Mines had written an epitaph for
that older world, the world he would mourn for all of his life. It was
She. In one passage, the eternally youthful Ayesha, deep within the cave-tombs
of ancient Kor, voiced the thoughts of an entire generation.
"O Kallikratesl" she cried ••• "I must look upon
thy race again, although it be agony. It is a generation since I looked
upon thee whom I slew -- slew with mine own hand." "Shall I raise thee,"
she said, apparently addressing the corpse, "so that thou standest there
before me, as of old? I can raise thee," and she held out her hands over
the sheeted dead, while her frame became rigid and terrible to see •••
I thought that the quiet form beneath the coverings began to quiver, and
the winding sheet to lift as though it lay on the breast of one who slept.
Suddenly Ayesha withdrew her hands, and the motion of the corpse seemed
to me to cease.
"To what purpose?" she said heavily. "Of what service
is it to recall the semblance of life when I cannot recall the spirit?"
Tormented from childhood by feelings of private guilt part
of a society that had lost its Prince, and member of a culture whose philosophies
and traditions, one by one, were falling before the test of change, Haggard
echoed the public fantasies of his readers by the personal fantasies that
energized his stories. Haggard embraced this dying world, and it, in turn,
embraced him, an unsuccessful "younger son," made successful by his unhappy
inner vision.
Young Burroughs was part of this dying world as well.
But he would not accept his role. He felt no morbid personal guilt, the
Civil War and Lincoln's death were ten long years before his birth, and
his culture, the pragmatic and technologically oriented culture of America,
was creating new traditions. For his generation, the ante bellum. South
-- with its roots in the Old World -- was the stuff of dreams, a long-past
romantic age.
But H. Rider Haggard wrote of Life and Death, and he had
a vast imagination, one that could clothe his inner thoughts in bizarre
and wonderful symbols wholly unlike those of any other writer of his time.
Young Edgar Rice Burroughs had a vast and wonderful imagination, too --
and so that year of 1889 saw the publication of another H. Rider Haggard
novel, one, with King Solomon's Mines and She, that probably changed the
course of Burroughs' life, inspired the Martian novels, and was grandparent
to the moat well-known fictional hero of the twentieth century, Tarzan
of the Apes.
The novel was Cleopatra.
Early in 1912, Frank A.. Munsey's All-Story Magazine began
publication of "Under the Moons of Mars," later to be printed in
book form as A Princess of Mars. It was Burroughs' first novel, and the
introductory story of his initial Martian trilogy. In
the opening episode, John Carter of Virginia, late of
the Army of the Confederacy, voyaged across space to the planet Mars. His
mode of travel was as puzzling to his editor then as it has been to fifty-seven
years of readers.
"Overcome by poisonous gas," the editor wrote in his
synopsis of the first part, "apparently he undergoes a physical metamorphosis,
some inherent part of him being released . . . In this state, through
series of phenomena, he finds himself transported
to the planet Mars . . ." The editor was only a little
less explanatory than Burroughs himself. Why did he choose that singular
means of passage? Travel by spaceship between the planets was not uncommon
in the fiction of the day. Burroughs' mode of transport ia so unusual in
the light of his other purely mechanical fictional devices that it is difficult
to dismiss.
As Burroughs told the story, John Carter -- "possessed
of several hundred thousand dollars (Confederate) and a captain's commission
. . . which no longer existed" -- travelled west after the war, prospecting.
Carter recalled no childhood. For as long as he could remember he had always
been a man -- a man of thirty. "Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more
.. . I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that
I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death
from which there is no resurrection."
In Arizona, Carter and his partner struck an immense vein
of gold. But soon after, hostile Indians attacked, and carrying the arrow-riddled
body of his companion, Carter took refuge in a mountain cave. There he
was overcome by a mysterious slight vapor," and fell to the floor, paralyzed
but in complete possession of his mental faculties.
From then until possibly midnight all was silence,
the silence o£ the dead; then, suddenly the awful moan of the morning
broke upon my startled ears, and there came again from the black shadows
the sound of a moving thing, and a faint rustling as of dead leaves. The
shock to my already overstrained nervous system was terrible to the extreme,
and with a superhuman effort I strove to break my awful
bonds. It was an effort of the mind, of the will, of
the nerves; not muscular, for I could not move even so much as a little
finger, but none the less mighty for all of that. And then something gave,
there was a momentary feeling of nausea, a sharp click as of 'the snapping
of steel wire, and I stood with my back against the wall of the cave facing
my unknown foe.
And then moonlight flooded the cave, and there before
me lay my own body as it had been lying all these hours, with the eyes
staring toward the open ledge and the hands resting limply on the ground.
I looked first at my lifeless clay there on the floor of the cave and then
down at myself in utter bewilderment; for there I lay clothed, and yet
here I stood but naked as the minute of my birth . . .
My first thought was, is this then death? Have I indeed
passed over forever into that other life? But I could not well believe
this, as I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs from the exertion
o£ my efforts . . .
Again was I suddenly recalled to my immediate surroundings
by repetition of the weird moan from the depths o£ the cave. Naked
and unarmed as I was, I had no desire to face the unseen thing which menaced
me . . .
. . . I leaped quickly through the opening into the starlight
of a clear Arizona night . . .
My attention was quickly riveted by a large red star close
to the distant horizon . . . It was Mars, the god of war, and for
me, the fighting man, it had always held the power o£ irresistible
enchantment. As I gazed at it on that far-gone night it seemed to call
across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone
attracts the particle of iron.
My longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed
my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself
drawn with the suddenness o£ thought through the trackless immensity
of space. There was an instant o£ extreme cold and utter darkness.
Burroughs' original working title for the novel was "My First
Adventure On Mars," and it is clear that the second in the series, The
Gods of Mars, had already been planned. A Princess of
Mars is an introductory work. After John
Carter's passage through the cold and darkness of space, we meet the fifteen
foot tall Green Martians and Tars Tarkas of Thark, and the human Red Martians
and Dejah Thoris, Princess o£ Helium. 'We roam Mars' trackless deserts,
the sea bottoms o£ an earlier age; encounter its great beasts; visit
its towering cities. We learn Barsoom's -- Mars' -- history. And we are
introduced to the ancient religion of Barsoom.
Early in his experiences Carter notes, "I saw no signs of
extreme age among them, nor is there any appreciable difference in their
appearance from the age of maturity, about forty, until, at the age or
one thousand years, they go voluntarily upon their last strange pilgrimage
down the river Iss, which leads no living Martian knows whither and from
whose bosom no Martian has ever returned, or would be allowed to live did
he return after once embarking upon its cold, dark waters" (27). Later,
Dejah Thoris tells him, "Except in the legends of our ancestors, there
is no record of a Barsoomian returning up the river Iss, from the shores
of Korus in the valley of Dor" (60). Already in this first book, Burroughs
had imagined the world of the Valley Dor.
A Princess of Mars bears a slight, but suggestive,
similarity to King Solomon's Mines. As with She and Cleopatra, the
body of Haggard's story is also presented as an original manuscript, told
in the first person. Both novels involve subsidiary hunts for riches, diamonds
in King Solomon's Mines, gold in Burroughs novel.
There are long desert treks in each story, and mountain
caves containing human remains. Each has a subplot in which a sympathetic
barbarian overthrows the cruel king who has wronged him and assumes
the throne -- Ignosi, rightful king of the Kukuana, in
King Solomon's Mines, and Tars Tarkas, ultimately Jeddak of Thark, in A
Princess of Mars. Both characters conclude their speeches similarly.
"I have spoken," Ignosi says, in a manner apparently
characteristic of the Zulus and Tars Tarkas -- as Barsoomians do -- says,
"I am done" (57). (However, in the second book in the series, Tars Tarkas
concludes his remarks with "I have spoken."
And in a deep cavern, in the land of the Kukuana, Haggard's
explorers discover a strange figure carved from stone which suggests the
spear-carrying fifteen foot Green Martians: "There at the end of the long
stone table, holding in his skeleton fingers a great white spear, sat Death
itself, shaped in the form of a colossal human skeleton, Fifteen feet or
more in height" (240).
These likenesses are slight; but they do establish a similarity
o! symbolic patterns in the works of Haggard and Burroughs. (A clearer
possible connection between King Solomon's Mines and the
Martian novels may be found in The Chessmen of Mars,
the fifth in the series.)
After making a warrior's friendship with Tars Tarkas,
the fierce Green Martian, rescuing Dejah Thoris from captivity, saving
her city from its enemies, wedding his princess, and preserving all Barsoom
from death when Mars' great atmosphere plant -- which creates air for the
dying planet -- fails, Carter is called back to Earth as mysteriously as
he was sent. Ten earthly years have passed when he awakens once more in
that Arizona cave.
In The Gods of Mars, after ten more years have
passed, Carter returns to Barsoom, again called by some strange power or
force. This time there is no "slight vapor" to aid him. As he stands on
a bluff above the Hudson River praying to return to Mars he experiences
once more the sensations of twenty years before. Once more he stands above
his seemingly dead body, and once more he crosses space to Mars.
This time, however, he appears on the banks of the legendary
Lost Sea of Korus, into which empties the River Iss, in the Valley Dor.
The Martians who make their pilgrimage here believe it is heaven; they
find that it is hell, inhabited by man-eating plant men, controlled by
the Holy Therns, the cruel priests of a religion that worships Issus, "Goddess
of Life Eternal."
116
Unknown to the Holy Therns, they are themselves prey
of Issus and her subjects, the Black Martians -- the self-described "First
Born" -- who inhabit a world beneath the Valley Dor. Ultimately, Carter
exposes Issus as mortal, and destroys her religion.
The concluding novel, The Warlord of Mars, continues
from where The Gods of Mars leaves off, but it is anti-climactic.
The extraordinary energy that drives The Gods of Mars, central and
pivotal story in the trilogy, is less controlled, and the story plunges
into wild action which is no longer as deeply meaningful.
Why did Burroughs choose John Carter's curious means of
transport? Is there another significant source beyond Burroughs himself
for the Martian religion and the world of the Valley Dor? Twenty-three
years before, Harmachis, the tragic hero of Haggard's Cleopatra had voyaged
into space -- as an initiate into "those fast mysteries that are learned
of the chosen of the Gods" he was called to Amenti, the Place of Death,
home of Isis, goddess of life.
"Isis, Holy Mother," I prayed.
"Isis, Spouse of Heaven, come unto me, be with me now; I faint! be with
me now!"
And then I knew that things were not
as things had been. The air around me began to stir, it rustled as the
wings of eagles rustle, it took life . . .
I knew that I was drawing near the
confines of the Dead. Nay. I was dying fast, and oh the horror of it! .
. . One struggle and the
stillness crept into my brain . . .
I was dying, and then, nothingness!
I was dead!
A change -- life came back to me,
but between the new life and the life that had been was a gulf and a difference.
Once more I stood in the darkness of the shrine, but it blinded me no more.
It was clear as . . . day, although it was still black. I stood;
and yet it was not I who stood, but rather my spiritual part, for at my
feet lay my dead Self. There it lay, rigid and still, a stamp of awful
calm sealed upon its face, while I gazed on it.
And as I gazed, filled with wonder,
I was caught up on the Wings of Flame and whirled away! away I faster than
the lightning's flash. Down I fell, through depths of empty space set here
and
there with glittering crowns of stars. Down for ten million
miles and ten times ten million, till at length I hovered over a place
of soft unchanging light, wherein were Temples, Palaces and Abodes, such
as no man ever saw in the visions of his sleep . . . Their spires pierced
up and up; their great courts stretched around . . . Here was the
flash of crystal, and there the blaze of gems shone even through the glory
that rolls around the city which is in the Place of Death. There were trees,
and their voices as they rustled was the voice of music; there was air,
and, as it blew, its breath was the sobbing note of song.
Shapes . . . mysteriously wonderful,
rushed up to meet me and bore me down till I seemed to stand on another
earth . . .
"Throw back the Gates . . .
open wide, the Doors!" pealed the awful voice . . . Pass On, Child
of Earth; but before thou goest look up that thou mayest learn how far
thou art ••• from earth."
I looked up. Beyond the glory that
shone about the city was black night, and high on its bosom twinkled one
tiny star.
"Behold the world that thou hast left,"
said the Voice, behold and tremble."
Harmachis had not dreamed his adventure.
In Amenti, Isis had confirmed that he was the true Pharaoh ot Egypt, and
revealed that the Ftolemies would be overthrown and her own worship restored
-- if
Harmachis remained faithful to his people and his vows.
Then "a Voice called aloud the awful Word" and the Egyptian was returned
to earth, and to his corporeal body. "Once again I woke to find myself
stretched at length upon the stone flooring of the Holy Place of Isis that
is at Abouthis." (61).
Ultimately, Harmachis' fleshly desire for Cleopatra became
his ruin and the final ruin of Egypt. Only the gift of revenge against
the Ptolemy herself was granted him. As in so many of Haggard's novels,
there is an obsession with death, a morbid preoccupation with guilt, and
a tortuous division of love into the "spiritual" and the "profane."
But this episode -- some twenty four hundred words long
in
its entirety -- is remarkably suggestive. A rustling precedes the division
of the astral from the corporeal body, in both Haggard's tale and Burroughs'
In each instance the protagonist is in the dark when the division occurs,
and each then looks down at his dead body -- Harmachis to see in the blackness
itself, John Carter in a sudden flood of moonlight. Each crosses tens of
millions of miles of space to another world -- a world of towering spires,
and blazing with gems. One arrives in the realm ot Isis, Goddess of Life,
the other in that of Issus, Goddess of Life
Eternal. And each returns to his physical body on Earth.
It is singular, but not beyond coincidence -- and Carter's
first trip to Mars did not take him to the Valley Dor, despite the allusions
to it. However, there is a strange anomaly in that first story: the incident
in the cave, the "slight vapor" that overcame him. What was its source?
After his return to Earth, following the events in A
Princess of Mars, Carter finds himself in the blackness of the Arizona
cave. He strikes a match, preserved by the desert climate . . .
. . . Its dim flue lighted up what appeared to
be a huge cave, toward the back of which I discovered a strange, still
figure huddled over a tiny bench. As I approached it I saw that it was
the dead and mummified remains of a little old woman with long black hair,
and the thing it leaned over was a small charcoal burner upon which rested
a round copper vessel containing a small quantity of greenish powder. Behind
her, descending from the roof upon rawhide thongs, and stretching entirely
across the cave, was a row of human ' skeletons. From the thong which held
them stretched another. to the dead hand of the little old woman; as I
touched the cord the skeletons swung to the motion with a noise as of the
rustling of dry leaves. (l57-8)
Here, the old woman departs from the Martian series, never
to return. No explanation is ever offered. But it would seem none is needed
-- if The Gods of Mars were the first story conceived in the trilogy,
and if the others grew about it: if the opening and closing episodes of
A
Princess of Mars had been originally intended to frame an earlier conception
of The Gods of Mars.
