The Transformation (and Affirmation) of
The Mucker II
by Alan Hanson
On one level, The Mucker is a love story.
It’s certainly not a classic one nor is it the main theme of the novel.
Still it is an important element in the story, because falling in love
was one of motivating factors in Billy’s personal transformation. Once
Barbara Harding taught Billy to see other people as individuals, it was
natural that he began to see her as most young men, no doubt, saw her.
Suddenly, Billy “saw what he had not before seen — a very beautiful girl,
brave and unflinching.” He didn’t recognize that he was falling in love
— and maybe he wasn’t at this point — but whatever he felt for her caused
him to save her life after the wreck of the “Halfmoon.”
Although Billy was not quite certain why he saved Barbara,
or Theriere earlier, his newfound process of trying to analyze his actions
led him to the conclusion that perhaps he was not entirely as rotten as
Barbara had once explained, and so, according to ERB, Billy “wished
for an opportunity to demonstrate the fact.” Burroughs obliged by having
Barbara captured by the Japanese headhunters on a Pacific island. Driven
by love — an emotion he had never felt before and so didn’t recognize at
this point — Billy, along with Theriere, set off to rescue the woman he
had threatened to kill just weeks earlier.
Before looking deeper into Barbara’s effect on Billy’s
transformation, a quick look into Theriere’s role in the same process needs
to be understood. Theriere, who had been involved in the plot to kidnap
Barbara, came to regret it and sought to redeem himself by rescuing her
and returning her safely to her own people. Billy also wanted to do something
to redeem himself in Barbara’s eyes for the killing of her friend Billy
Mallory, but, while Barbara was his motivator, she could not show him how
a man should act. Billy needed a role model, and Theriere’s job in the
story was to serve that purpose. Together Billy and Theriere saved Barbara
from the headhunters, and during the few days it took them to do it, Theriere,
according to ERB, “transferred, all unknown to himself or the other
man, a measure of the gentility and chivalry that were his by birthright,
for, unrealizing, Billy Byrne was patterning himself after the man he had
hated and had come to love.” Once Theriere had played his part in Billy’s
transformation, ERB had no further need for him in the story, and so Theriere
succumbed to a headhunter’s spear, a final example of self-sacrificing
heroism for Billy. Later, Bridge would be another role model for Billy.
After Billy rescued Barbara from the headhunters, Burroughs
isolated them together for a period of time, ostensibly so they could hide
from the aborigines while waiting for an opportunity to return to their
friends on the coast. During this juncture, Billy, for the first time,
opened his heart to Barbara. He realized he loved her and told her so.
(This newfound ability to express his feelings openly was another gift
from Theriere.) Toward the end of the novel, though, Billy would realize
that what he felt for Barbara at this point was not really love, since
it wasn’t a strong enough emotion to cross what he saw as the “unbridgeable
gap” between them socially.
To shield them from the headhunters, Billy built separate
huts for the two of them on the small rocky island. That was to be expected,
but how Billy jokingly labeled the two domiciles demonstrated his lack
of self-worth. Her hut he called “Number One Riverside Drive” and
his own “de Bowery.” “De roughnecks belongs on de Bowery, so
dat’s wot we’ll call my dump down by de river,” he explained to her.
“You’re a highbow, so youse gotta live on Riverside Drive, see?”
Barbara responded, “Wouldn’t you rather be a ‘highbrow’ too, and live
up on Riverside Drive, right across the street from me?” Billy’s considered
response was, “It’s too late fer me ever to belong, now. Yeh gotta be
borned to it.” This belief of Billy’s that no matter how much he changed,
no matter how honorable and chivalrous he became, no matter how strong
his love for Barbara, he would always be a mucker at heart, was the great
roadblock in his transformation. It spoke to his lack of self-respect,
for until he felt good enough about himself to break through that barrier,
there could be no fundamental change in the character of Bill Byrne.
“Fer her sake”
In was not until the final scenes of the novel that Billy
found the power within himself to effect his transformation. But back on
their island, Billy was not able to summon the strength needed to change.
Instead he looked to another for that strength, and in doing so, unknowingly
headed down a near fatal road. It was Barbara who first put the thought
in his mind. “Won’t you try (to be a gentleman)? For my sake?” she
asked him. Billy jumped up at the suggestion. Subconsciously it relieved
him of making his own decisions. From then on, his criteria for acting
would not be, “What do I think is the best thing to do?” but “What
would Barbara want me to do?” He reasoned, “I can’t have her … but
if I can’t live with her, I can live fer her as she’d want me to live.”
His slogan became, “Fer her sake,” and while it did remind him to
do the right thing from time to time, it ultimately almost cost him his
life. But that came later.
The first thing Billy agreed to do “fer her sake”
was take English lessons. In their first encounter, Billy’s crude slang
and Barbara’s refined grammar accentuated the great gulf between them.
Later, though, mutual hardship made both willing to narrow that gulf, and
language seemed an obvious place to start. “You must, Mr. Byrne, learn
to speak correctly,” directed Barbara. “You mustn’t say ‘youse’
for ‘you,’ or ‘wot’ for ‘what’ — you must try to talk as I talk.” It
was the first time Billy let Barbara, and later Barbara’s vision, make
decisions for him. “All right,” agreed Billy, “youse — you pitch
in an’ learn me wot — whatever you want to an’ I’ll do me best to talk
like a dude — fer your sake.”
With Barbara’s coaching, Billy upgraded his grammar until
he could indeed speak like Barbara. However, during the remainder of the
novel, Billy’s speech moved back and forth. Sometimes he used Barbara’s
English, and at other times reverted back to the Chicago street slang of
his youth. Much later in Mexico, the cultured Bridge asked Billy, “Why
is it, Billy, that upon occasion you speak king’s English after the manner
of the boulevard, and again after that of the back alley?” Billy’s
response showed he didn’t understand the real reason for his word choices.
“I was born and brought up on ‘dat,” he explained. "She taught
me the other line of talk. Sometimes I forget. I had about twenty years
of the other and only one of her’s, and twenty to one is a long shot —
more apt to lose than win.” In reality, Billy’s outward language was
symbolic of the struggle that was going on inside him. Billy was right
in noting that the influence of twenty years on the street was a formidable
opposition for the changes he desired to make “fer (or for) her sake.”
As Burroughs pointed out, at the time Barbara was teaching
Billy to speak gentlemen’s English, “it seemed that Billy Byrne was
undergoing a metamorphosis, and at that instant there was still a question
as to which personality would dominate.” For example, on the headhunter
island, there was a real struggle within Billy between acting solely by
instinct, as learned on the streets of Chicago, and by reason, as Barbara
taught him. On one hand, when Barbara was abducted, Billy felt a “mad
and unreasoning rage,” which he didn’t stop to reason out, and at the
thought that Barbara might have been beheaded, “Something strange rose
in the mucker’s breast … He did not attempt to analyze the sensations.”
A short time later, though, he did take the time to reason, “wondering
why he was risking his life to rescue or avenge this girl whom he hated
so.” Again later, after speaking rudely to Barbara, “the mucker
read in her expression something of the wound his words had inflicted,
and he lay thinking upon the matter for some time.” Much later, in
a conversation with Bridge, Billy acknowledged the struggle that started
within him at that time. “I began to change then. It was mighty slow,
an’ I’m still a roughneck; but I’m gettin’ on.”
Billy’s alternate use of street and formal spoken English,
then, reflected the struggle inside him between what he was and what he
wanted to be. The contest of personalities within and grammar without continued
right up to the final page of the novel. When Barbara was present or at
other times when gentility and chivalry were called for, he spoke as she
taught him. On the other hand, amid the joy of high adventure or the desperation
of great stress, Billy called on the strengths of the mucker and so talked
like him. Sometimes nostalgia for the old days brought out the peculiar
language of Chicago’s West Side. Once Billy thought to himself, “Funny
how a girl and poetry can get a tough nut like me. I wonder what the guys
who used to hang out in the back of Kelly’s ‘ud say if they seen what was
goin’ on in my bean just now.”
“Once I aspired”
Part 1 of The Mucker ends
with Billy Byrne talking with Barbara Harding in her family’s New York
City house. Well along the road to his personal transformation, Billy had
learned to care for others, and to care what others thought about him.
He had learned how to love and how to be a friend. He told Barbara, “You’ve
taught me pride and self-respect.” Billy may have thought so at that
point, but if he really had learned true pride and self-respect, he would
not have done what he did — walk away from the woman he loved. Billy had
changed enough to cross the physical distance between Grand Avenue and
Riverside Drive, but he had not yet developed the strength of character
to cross the psychological distance between the two lifestyles those streets
represented. “I have learned,” he told Barbara, “the unbridgeable
chasm that stretches between Billy Byrne, the mucker, and such as you.
Once I aspired; but now I know, as you must have always known, that a single
lifetime is far too short for a man to cover the distance from Grand Avenue
to Riverside Drive.” Billy would be back to claim Barbara only after
developing the self-confidence to do so.
Billy, however, left Barbara’s home in New York thinking
he had given her up forever. His intention was to live without her, but
for her. As Burroughs explained, “He still clung to the ideals she had
awakened in him” and “he still sought to be all that she might wish
him to be.” His first action in keeping with that creed would show
him the folly of trying to live his life by Barbara Hardings’ ideals. She
taught him to be honorable, and that took him back to Chicago to clear
his name with the law.
It didn’t take long to learn that Barbara’s ideals had
led his astray in this case. The regard for law, order, and justice she
had instilled in him was shattered when the state used perjured witnesses
to falsely convict Billy of murder and sentence him to life in prison.
To save himself, Billy called upon the mucker side of his personality,
throwing himself and the deputy sheriff handcuffed to him off the train
heading to Joliet. The vision of Barbara’s face kept Billy from killing
the deputy, but from then on Billy was less willing to trust his fate to
what Barbara would have wanted him to do. In the future, he more often
turned to the instincts and talents of his street education to guide his
actions.
“Whoever tries it gets
his, see?”
After being railroad by the justice
system, an angry Billy was dangerously close to sliding completely back
into his mucker personality. He needed some guidance to keep him on the
right path. Barbara was not around, and he longer trusted her judgment
in absentia. So Burroughs brought the character Bridge on stage to serve
as a role model for Billy. First and foremost, by expressing himself so
often with poetry, Bridge taught Billy that common people could appreciate
cultured things as well as the high born. In addition, Bridge was an example
to Billy that bravery need not be accompanied by great physical strength.
Billy acknowledged that Bridge continued the civilizing influence on him
that Barbara Harding began. “She helped me most, of course, an’ now
you’re helpin’ me a lot, too — you an’ your poetry stuff,” Billy told
Bridge.
As the two men crossed the border into Mexico to avoid
American lawmen, Billy began the last phase of his personal transformation.
He now knew he could never completely become a gentleman of the type who
populated Barbara Hardings’ world. The key thing that Billy finally realized,
though, was that he need not be ashamed of all that he was as a mucker.
In addition to the corrupting influences, his upbringing in Chicago had
instilled some admirable qualities in Billy as well. Courage, loyalty,
physical aggressiveness, and love of adventure were the positive residue
of his criminal youth. In Mexico, Billy learned to stop the struggle between
the two personalities within him, and, instead seek a balance between the
two.
First, Billy gave into his youthful love of adventure.
He discarded any thoughts of living a gentleman’s life and joined Pesita’s
band of Mexican revolutionary bandits. The “wild half-savage life which
association with the bandits promised” appealed to Billy, who enjoyed
the bandits’ running gun battles. He used his West Side skills to crack
a safe and took the money from the bank in Cauivaca. It seemed that Billy
had returned to his old criminal ways, and, in fact, Barbara Harding later
castigated Billy. “You robbed the bank, Billy?” She asked. “It
was you after the promises you made to me to live straight always — for
my sake.” Billy had used the reasoning skills Barbara taught him to
rationalize all of his activities with Pesita as being honorable. Knowing
nothing of the Mexican political situation, Billy believed he had simply
joined an army, and his job was to serve his commander, in this case Pesita.
As for the money in the bank, it was the enemy’s resources, and it was
his duty to deprive them of it.
When Barbara Harding was kidnapped, Billy stopped trying
to reason things out and let his mucker personality take control. This
was apparent in both Billy’s language and attitude when he arrived at the
Harding ranch looking for Barbara. Riding up Billy addressed Eddie Shorter
as follows:
“I’m tipped off that a bunch o’ siwashes was down here
last night to swipe Miss Harding. We gotta go see if she’s here or not,
an’ don’t try any funny business on me, Eddie. I ain’t a-goin’ to be taken
again, an’ whoever tries it gets his, see?”
Wounded by Indians during his search for Barbara, Billy
went into what Burroughs called a very ungentlemanly like “berserker
rage.” Burroughs conveyed his resulting actions in language descriptive
of a Chicago slaughterhouse. Billy “stood there pumping lead into his
assailants — not hysterically, but with the cool deliberation of a butcher
slaughtering beeves.”
While allowing the mucker in him to dominate his emotions,
Billy nevertheless was guided by chivalrous motives throughout the rescue
and defense of Barbara. At the time, Billy thought Barbara and Bridge loved
each other, and during the fight, Billy had a chance to stand by while
Bridge was in danger. However, the thought of abandoning his friend for
his own advantage never crossed his mind. Instead, amid a hail of gunfire,
Billy went out to rescue the wounded Bridge. Facing death again, Billy
rode through the attacking Mexicans to bring American troops to the rescue.
This time it was a fully transformed Billy Byrne who rescued
Barbara Harding and took her for his own. He had taken control of his own
life, becoming the man he wanted to be, and not what others wanted him
to be. He had found the proper balance between the mucker and the gentleman
in him. Once he had wondered how he could cross the unbridgeable gap between
Barbara and himself; now he knew the answer was not to cross it, but to
eliminate it. And now he was ready to do so.
“And as they went there grew in Billy’s breast a love
so deep and resistless that he found himself wondering that he had ever
imagined that his former passion for this girl was love. The new thing
surged through him and over him with all the blind, brutal, compelling
force of a mighty tidal wave. It battered down and swept away the frail
barriers of his new-found gentleness. Again he was the Mucker — hating
the artificial wall of social caste which separated him from this girl;
but now he was ready to climb the wall, or better still, to batter it down
with his huge fists.”
“I wont’ give you up again”
It was an assertive and confident Billy
who took Barbara Harding roughly into his arms and declared, “I gave
you up once when I thought it was better for you to marry a man in your
own class. I won’t give you up again … if anyone tries to keep me from
taking you they’ll get killed.” Although most of this statement is
proper English, it ends with a decidedly ungrammatical clause. Perhaps
Burroughs purposely structured it so to show the mixture of values the
fully transformed Billy Byrne had become. In any event, in the end Burroughs
presented Billy Byrne as a distinctly American example of a self-made man.
With no help from the government (some interference, instead) and a little
help from his friends, Billy raised himself from a life of poverty and
crime to one of self-respect and dignity.
Of course, Edgar Rice Burroughs himself traversed a similar
road from failure to respectability. It is known Burroughs, as a successful
writer, tapped into many of the experiences and lessons of his own unproductive
youth. Perhaps, the transformation of Billy Byrne was a reflection of how
Edgar Rice Burroughs saw himself — minus the muscles, of course.
— The End —
