My Library -- Edgar Rice Burroughs (Part Two)

Edgar Rice Burroughs
photo credit: http://www.tarzan.org/bio/26.jpg

This is the second part of “My Library – Edgar Rice Burroughs.” In my first entry, I described how I was surprised to discover that my memories (such as they are) of becoming a fan of ERB were wrong. I had read only half a dozen or so of his books during the my first 5 years of reading speculative fiction. And, for lack of any other explanation, I must have become a big fan of his in the 1968-69 time period, based on fan club material I still have from that time period. Now, in this post I will explore why I think Burroughs came to have had such a lasting influence in my idea of what a story should be.

photo credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chessmen_of_Mars

I will begin in a roundabout way. While searching for some photos of Burroughs to illustrate my posts, I came across an article from the Saturday Evening Post issue of 29 July, 1939

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2018/11/how-to-become-a-great-writer/

that perhaps provides some clues. It is an entertaining and very tongue in cheek article by Alva Johnston with the title of; “How to Become a Great Writer.”

It opens with the line, “Everybody sooner or later turns out to be a writer. Get deep enough into anybody’s confidence, and you find that he has manuscripts.” and adds that “...the people are smart. They are on the right trail. Writing is the shortest cut to affluence except inheriting big money.” Right. He does, however, goes on to say that Hollywood was, in 1939, desperately short of writers, and that good ones earned $5,000 a week or more for screen work and that radio-script work writers could earn salaries in 5 figures, per week.

photo credit: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9Dgm1HELxr6x1vwUF1HnmomejpzdD3K2GmvUozhUkPCjPJmFKevFEFi3a1uoCCuOgTAqS7acJtR9djzvxzxIz-m2Uz1TcwPXSNFe8E29XEmFnyCFvtB6k_1DC7877il10h_YHmc_wmSwp/s1600/02_a_venus_stjohn_pirates.jpg

Alva bases “greatness” in the title of the article on three criteria; “1) The size of the writer’s public. 2) His or her success in establishing a character in the consciousness of the world. And 3) The probability of his or her being read by posterity.” (I’ve had to add “or her” to Alva’s copy to make it a little more modern. In 1939 it seems writing was very male, at least in Alva Johnston’s view.) And judged by these tests, Mr Johnston says that "Edgar Rice Burroughs is first and the rest nowhere."

He then lists the “main rules for literary training that can be gathered from the experience of Burroughs. They are: 1) Be a disappointed man. 2) Achieve no success at anything you touch. 3) Lead an unbearably drab and uninteresting life. 4) Hate civilization. 5) Learn no grammar. 6) Read little. 7) Write nothing. 8) Have an ordinary mind and commonplace tastes, approximating those of the great reading public. 9) Avoid subjects that you know about.”

He goes on to describe ERB’s life and Tarzan in Hollywood movies. And, dear to my heart, is how he “escaped grammar.” It was a lucky accident. “He (ERB) was sent first to a private school in Chicago which held that the teaching of English grammar was nonsense and that students should absorb grammar through Latin and Greek. Edgar absorbed no Latin and Greek. He was then sent to Phillips Andover, which, assuming that all freshmen were thoroughly drilled in grammar, ignored that subject. Phillips Andover quickly waived on young Burroughs, and he was sent to military academy, which paid no attention to grammar. Edgar thus became an uninhibited writer, free from the anxieties about moods and tenses which kill spontaneity. Burroughs doesn’t know whether he is grammatical or not, and cares less.”

photo credit: https://www.edgarriceburroughs.com/artwork/

Burroughs is clearly a fellow after my own heart – or perhaps, more correctly, the reverse, I am a follower of Burroughs. I was no doubt taught grammar in high school. I remember that we (as in the class, not necessarily me) learned how to diagram sentences, and such, but I have retained little of what was taught today. I know what a noun is, and a verb, and maybe an adverb, but beyond that…well, the less said the better. And I can’t diagram a sentence today to save my soul. However, I have always maintained that you don’t need to be able to take a car apart and put it back together in order to drive it. Enough. I’ll save that rant for another post. Back to Burroughs.

I’m not going to claim that Burroughs was a great writer. He was, however, a great pulp writer. Perhaps the greatest. He had an amazing imagination which filled his stories with a that all important “sense of wonder.” And with it, he could slyly slip in a bit of satire as well. His narrators and characters were relatable. I’m a sucker for first person narrations, and I always enjoyed traveling along with his narrators. His writing was straightforward, approachable. Like P.G. Wodehouse, he had a story pattern that he used over and over, but, like Wodehouse, he used it well, and made it fresh, at least in his best works. That said, from the few ratings I have preserved, it is clear that his stories didn’t always wow! me.

photo credit:http://thejohncarterfiles.com/2011/04/the-roy-krenkel-ace-cover-art-quiz/

I’ll be honest, all that said, I have no more desire for revisiting his stories, than I have for most of the other books I read during that time of my life – with the notable exception of the first three books of the Martian series. I’ve already read those books at least four times. Heck, I even read them to the kids as bedtime stories when they were young. For all its shortcomings, A Princess of Mars is still one of my very favorite books. Oh, today, I would certainly like a more completely drawn narrator, and I would certainly like a princess with more agency, and well, I simply wish there was more to every element of the story. My imagination these days can’t fill in all the sketched in spaces in these pulp tales. But for all its shortcomings, it is still a great book.

Still, as I said, I think that ERB was the greatest pulp writer of his age. Period. He gave them wonderful worlds, bristling with creativity and imagination. He wrote escapist literature, but, at his peak, you escaped.

photo credit: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/476044623084413343/

In some ways, he is the anti-Heinlein, in that his stature has only grown in my view over the years, even as Heinlein’s shrunk. Part of that growing esteem I have for ERB is that I’ve come to realize just how much of an influence Burroughs has had on my own writing. The basic formula of episodic adventures, tied together with the thread of a romance, especially when related by a first person narrators, is the formula I use for my stories. Of course, I’d like to think that many other wonderful writers who I’ve read, writers like John Buchan, H. Rider Haggard, P. G. Wodehouse, Patrick O’Brian, Raymond Chandler, have also contributed to my ability to write and entertain. But I know that I owe a great debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs. I feel fortunate that I discovered him at an age when I could fully appreciate his work.