The woman -- alive when Carter entered the cave,
for how else could the vapour have been produced? -- would have been an
earthly analogue of Issus, the cave her temple; and the death of Issus
on Barsoom would have ensured the old woman's sympathetic death on Earth.
The artistic symmetry the final work so curiously lacks would have been
present in such a tale. Otherwise, there is reason for neither the old
woman nor for her death.
Seen in this light, other dimensions of The Gods of
Mars reveal themselves. If the trilogy had grown from an earlier form
of the book, then Dejah Thoris, John Carter's princess and the heroine
of the trilogy, would probably not have played a part in that tale -- for
her function is not crucial to events in the Valley Dor itself. Thuvia,
the beautiful princess of Ptarth, who had been captured and enslaved by
the Holy Therns during her mysterious pilgrimage down the River Iss, could
have performed effectively in both roles. And without Dejah Thoris and
the events external to Dor, the novel acquires a haunting familiarity.
If Burroughs' inspiration for The Gods of Mars
is Cleopatra, then the human relationships and geography of Dor found their
origin in She.
H. Rider Haggard's She is the story of a mortal
woman of compelling beauty who has bathed in "the flame of Life," and who
has remained youthful -- "the face before me was that of a young woman
of certainly not more than thirty . . ."(l25) -- for two thousand years.
Queen of a lost African-valley, the grave site of an unknown people who
built a now-ruined city and constructed the cave-tombs in which she dwells,
Ayesha has awaited the return of the lover she slew in frustrated passion
in the dawn of her youth. Leo Vincey, a reincarnation of Kallikartes, the
man who gave up Ayesha and eternal life for the love of an Egyptian princess,
Amenartas, finds his way into the valley, following instructions left by
Alenartas, his mother two thousand years removed. He is accompanied by
his guardian and friend, the narrator of the story.
As Burroughs describes it in The Gods ot Mars,
the Valley Dor lies beyond a great antarctic ice barrier. The ice fields
surround the Valley Otz, he explains, which "lies in a mighty depression
at the south pole. It is sunk thousands of feet below the level of the
surrounding country, like a great round bowl. A hundred miles from its
northern boundary rise the Otz Mountains which circle the inner valley
of Dor, in the exact centre of which lies the Lost Sea of Korus. On the
shore of this sea stands the Golden Temple of Issus . . . " (75-6). The
River Iss flows beneath the ice fields and below the floor of the Valley
Otz -- though its canyon-like channel is exposed to the sky there -- and
then through the walls of the Otz Mountains to drain at last into the Lost
Sea of Korus in the Valley Dor.
In Haggard's tale, the valley of Kor lies in Africa, beyond
the barrier of a great swamp. The ground rises, rather than falls, until
a vast plain is reached -- but from it towers an immense circular mountain
of volcanic origin. A deep channel cuts across the plain and through the
wall of the mountain to its hollow, roofless interior, the valley of Kor,
which in lost ages had been the bed of an enormous lake. A river, drainage
from the Valley, flows out this channel into the plain, and it is through
the channel that Haggard's adventurers enter Kor (100-105).
Within Kor and the Valley Dor, beneath their mighty cliffs,
are vast meadows and signs of cultivation. (The cliffs of Dor are shot
with veins of gold, broken by outcroppings of "ruby, emerald,
and diamond boulders" (21), which suggest the "blaze
of gems" that shone about Cleopatra's Amenti.) In the distance, both John
Carter and Haggard's narrator catch glimpses of strange buildings, Burroughs'
character of a "gilded minaret" (28), Haggard's of "colossal
ruins" (105). And then each finds refuge in a cave, part of a network of
caves and tunnels that wind through the mountains' walls. The ruler of
the caves apparently rules Kor, in She; and in Burroughs' story,
the Holy Therns seem to rule the Valley Dor.
In The Gods ot Mars there are three principal female
characters (aside from Dejah Thoris), Phaidor, willful daughter of the
ruling high priest ot the Holy Therns; Thuvia, princess of Ptarth and slave
of the Holy Therns; and ancient Issue, Death, "Goddess of Life Eternal,"
who dwells in her golden temple by the Lost Sea of Korus -- and who truly
rules the Valley Dor.
In She there are -- seemingly -- only two female
roles, queen Ayesha and her subject and slave, Ustane, the reincarnation
of the Princess Amenartas. Both Phaidor and Thuvia love John Carter
as Ayesha and Ustane love Haggard's Leo Vineey. Their
characters are analogous. But, in fact, there is a third female role in
She,
as well. Ayesha is two women, the young woman she appears to be,
much like Phaidor; and the old, old woman, much like Issus, her seeming
youth conceals -- the woman Ayesha eventually comes to be. This old woman
is a personification of Death -- the true ruler of Kor.
Burroughs has described Issus in her temple, after she
had summoned Phaidor to serve her (and then to be slain after the passage
of a Martian year):
On this bench or throne squatted a female black.
She was evidently very old. Not a hair remained upon her wrinkled skull.
With the exception of two yellow tangs she was utterly toothless. On either
side ot her thin, hawk-like nose her eyes burned from the depths of horribly
sunken sockets. The skin of her face was seamed and creased in a million
deep cut furrows. Her body was as wrinkled as her face, and as repulsive.
Emaciated arms and legs attached to a torso which seemed to be mostly distorted
abdomen completed the 'holy vision of her radiant beauty.' (85)
And Haggard has described Ayesha after Death summoned her
in the cave of the flame of Life (237), immediately following her ill-omened
journey to the haunted ruins of the Temple of Truth
in the city of Kor, the "colossal ruins" Haggard's narrator
had glimpsed upon entering the valley. Her appearance paralleled that of
Gagool, the ancient and dreadful witch-woman of King
Solomon's Mines (136-7), and foreshadowed both
that of Issus and the "mummified remains of the little old woman with the
long black hair" in the Arizona cave:
Smaller and smaller she grew; her skin changed
colour, and in the place of the perfect whiteness of its lustre it had
turned a dirty brown and yellow, like an old piece of withered parchment.
. . . The delicate hand was nothing but a claw now, a human talon resembling
that of a badly preserved Egyptian mummy . . . Now the skin had puckered
into a million wrinkles, and on her shapeless
face was the stamp of unutterable age. She, who but two
minutes gone had gazed upon us -- the loveliest, noblest, most splendid
woman the world has ever seen - she lay before us, near the masses of her
own dark hair, no larger than a big ape, and hideous -- ah, too hideous
for words. (237)
Death as a carnate image had ceased to be, Death as a haunt,
a phantom, still lived and ruled in the ancient ruins of the Temple of
Truth, forever beyond the will of Man. She did not so live in her golden
temple in The Gods of Mars.
"First Born," [John Carter] cried, turning to
those who stood within the chamber, "you have seen today the impotency
of Issus -- the gods are omnipotent. Issus is no god. She is a cruel and
wicked old woman, who has deceived and played upon you for ages." (187)
And the Issus torn to bits by her former subjects was mortal.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' gift was to understand
Haggard's anguished personal story and the metaphysical statement implicit
in it. Instinct led him safely through the mother-oriented world dramatized
in King Solomon's Mines and She and Cleopatra, and
into the masculine domain beyond. He saw as Haggard never could that Woman
was not Mother, and the conflicts that Haggard could only resolve in a
denial of the flesh, in spirituality, and in death did not exist for him.
Moreover, the death that the tormented Haggard embraced as a solution was
anathema to Burroughs.
In its earliest conception, then, The
Gods of Mars may have been the single story of a man taken by Death,
who refuses to die, who rebels, and who destroys Death herself. Where the
guilt ridden Ayesha, the eternal woman, seemingly forever thirty, surrenders
to the will of Isis (for Haggard's is always a morbidly feminine world,
one filled with iron whim but forever yielding to Fate), the vital, life-seeking
John Carter, the eternal man, forever thirty, denies Issus and demands
Life, a rebel even in Hell.
This version, however, would have been
no more than She reshaped by a healthy masculine mind. It would
have cried no to death, but it would have given life no new direction.
Instead, The Gods of Mars became part of a trilogy, and around it
grew a whole new world, but a world that drew its inspiration from the
distant, pre-Christian past as well as from the present.
Beyond the Valley Dor, in the dreams that came to him
before his sleep, Burroughs constructed a new civilization, one reborn
upon the ruins of the old. He built it of Percival Lowell's theories of
Mars, of his own recollection of the Arizona desert and the Indians who
journeyed -- like Green Martians -- across its face, of Greek mythology
and its heroes, of his own imaginative speculations and those of others,
and of his private dreams. Behind them all, however, giving form and purpose
to nature and events, was Darwin's theory of evolution -- for Barsoom is
a dramatic recreation of "the survival of the fittest": a world that revels
in its animality, where men are born from eggs, and live the savage lives
of predacious beasts; where men and women exult in their naked bodies,
and hot-blooded passion, often absurdly real, evokes no shame.
Pale Ayesha, who ate only fruit and would not touch the
flesh of animals, had died after two thousand years of life, turned into
a large and ancient ape -- even as Haggard's generation saw divine, God-created
Man dying with the birth of evolution, after two thousand years of Christianity,
leaving behind only a large and ancient ape. Haggard's novel paralleled
the public's unspoken fantasies, particularly in England, with its dead
prince and aging queen. It dramatized their loss, and his private mourning
became their own. But in uniting evolution with his personal conflicts,
Haggard tainted Darwin's theory. He put upon it a sick and irrelevant moral
evaluation, one that -- unconsciously accepted by the public -- must have
intensified Victorian revulsion for the flesh.
Burroughs, the American, however, saw proof of
Man's divinity in the living body itself, perceiving in our long evolutionary
struggle the certain evidence that Man was more than the "beasts that perish."
He took a Westerner's pride in our savage will to survive, to understand
and dominate our world, to set our sight on goals the other animals could
never know.
And so he clothed cold Darwinism in human warmth, replacing
the morgue-like images that She and Huxley's lectures and Wells's
The
Island of Dr. Moreau evoked, and he gave his characters the nobility
he knew they must have as men.
From there, it would be only one step further to Tarzan
of the Apes.
Two astral bodies hurtling across space to other worlds,
Isis and Issus, Kor and Korus, twin Valleys of Death, the Eternal Woman
and the Eternal Man, and all the other similitudes -- all these could be
coincidence. But I do not think so.
Surely, Cleopatra and She and -- perhaps -- King
Solomon's Mines gave Edgar Rice Burroughs the crucial symbols with
which to utter his most deeply felt emotions. But The Gods of Mars
is not the work of a mere fabricator of "entertainment" who lifts plot
gimmicks and story devices from this book and that. It is the work of a
protagonist of his times. Burroughs came to his Martian trilogy not as
an imitator of H. Rider Haggard's ideas, but as a determined opponent of
the despairing philosophy of Haggard and the Establishment of his era.
In The Gods of Mars he makes no effort to conceal his
source. He states It openly, and argues against its author's beliefs and
the neurotic beliefs of the post-Darwin generation. And he advances his
own dreams of a new and vital and affirmative world to supplant the gloomy
ruin of the past.
For fifty-seven years, millions of men have dreamed
Edgar Rice Burroughs' dreams. Our own inhospitable Mars is no longer far
Barsoom. But the deeper dreams remain. There, the world has scarcely changed,
and so Edgar Rice Burroughs lives on, beyond his critics, a people's storyteller,
forever popular.
Time has a voice. It praises dreamers.
FOOTNOTES
1) She (Lancer Books, 1966), 134 (originally published
in 1887) .
2) A Princess of Mars (Ballantine, 1963), 12 (originally
published in six parts as "Under the Moons of Mars," by "Norman Bean,"
in The All-Story Magazine , February-July 1912).
3) Allan J. Tompkins, ed. The ERB Digest (Australia,
1967), 48 (citing H.H. Heins and Hulbert Burroughs
4) King Solomon's Mines (Dell, 1961), 50 (originally
published in 1885)
5) The Gods of Mars (Ballantine, 1969), 46 (originally
published in five parts in The All-Story Magazine, January-May 1913).
6) The "Hall of the Dead" in King Solomon's Mines
(239-244) strongly suggests Manator's "Hall of Chiefs" In Burroughs' The
Chessmen of Mars (107 ff.). Too, the life-like embalming and
mounting practices of Manator are not unlike those of
ancient Kor in She (147-150).
7) Cleopatra (Pocket Books, Inc., 1963), 54-6
(original publication date: 1889).
8) The Gods of Mars, 13; She 104-5.
9) The Gods of Mars is not the only Burroughs
novel that appears to have modern sources. The Mad King is unmistakably
derived from Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda. A likely explanation,
since
the story was written early In Burroughs' career, is
that he had "revised" The Prisoner of Zenda in his mind after he first
read it -- and well before he became a professional writer -- casting the
tale into a form that suited his own philosophy. "He used to put himself
to sleep by telling himself all kinds of stories about life on other planets
and in the far corners of the earth," John Harwood wrote in "The Master
of Adventure" for the Burroughs Bibliophiles. Unlike The Gods of Mars,
however, The Mad King was not transformed into a wholly new work.
Entertaining enough, the story is of interest primarily for the glimpse
it provides of that early, pre-literary Burroughs.
10) Editor's note: For details on the Homeric
sources of the Barsoom series see Mr. Kyle's letter in RQ III, 244.
