Pulp Review: Tarzan of the Apes

A Princess of Mars put Edgar Rice Burroughs on the map, but it was the second story he published in 1912, Tarzan of the Apes, that solidified him has an adventure story writer. Tarzan was also serialized in the All-Story, then later published as a novel in 1914. It was a smash, and Burroughs would go on to write over twenty novels in the series. 1918 would see the first two silent movie adaptations of the character, and Tarzan movies would appear in every single decade since up to now. (It makes sense. For Tarzan all you need is a muscular guy on a jungle set instead of the special effects bonanza that is Barsoom)

The story begins with an Englishman, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, sent to Africa in the 1880s to investigate claims of abuse of black natives by another European colonial power. Accompanied by his wife, Alice, the humanitarian mission never begins, since a mutiny on their ship leads to the couple being marooned on the western coast of Africa. Eking out a living, they give birth to a son, but tragedy takes both parents away. As fate would have it, the baby, also named John, would be adopted by Kala, a she-ape of the tribe who's chief, Kerchak, killed the elder Greystoke. They're not gorillas. The book makes it clear that they're more of a missing link species that has developed its own rudimentary language.

Named Tarzan by his adopted tribe, the boy grows up to become an apex predator. Weaker than the apes, but stronger than any normal man, Tarzan's greatest weapon is his clever mind and the eventual discovery of his parents' beach hut, where he slowly begins to learn using tools and even teaches himself to read English.

A tribe of cannibals, driven deeper into the jungle by colonialist firepower, settle near the area and one of their hunters kills Kala. Tarzan avenges her and begins to raid their village from time to time for supplies and pranks, as they think he's some kind of jungle spirit.

As he grows to maturity, another group of explorers is marooned at the same beach. A professor Archimedes Q. Porter has led an expedition to discover lost gold, succeeded, and the crew turned pirate on him and his family. Among the marooned are Jane Porter, the professor's lovely daughter, and William Cecil Clayton, Tarzan's cousin and heir to the Greystoke estate. Stunned at seeing other people that look like him, Tarzan's attraction to Jane draws him away from his simple jungle life and into the affairs of mankind.

There is a LOT going on under what is, on the surface, a straightforward tale of jungle adventure. The beginning taps into the same vein of classic adventure stories like The Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and Captains Courageous. As Tarzan grows, Burroughs frequently meditates on nature vs nurture themes, and how even removed from any human contact or experience, Tarzan's human qualities set him apart from everything around him. He is the noble savage; clear of mind and decisive, clever but needlessly cruel, a peak physical specimen, uncorrupted by the needless complications of civilization.

As for the topic of race, Tarzan's antagonism toward the cannibal tribe comes from a personal place: they killed his adopted mother. Esmeralda, Jane's black servant, frequently falls into “Lawdy lawdy” stereotypes, but she's also one of the few who understands the danger of the situation. Professor Porter and his colleague Samuel T. Philander are even worse stereotypes: the bumbling academics who are too stupid and oblivious to function in real danger. The two of them wander off into the jungle one night, get hopelessly lost, and argue about the merits of Moorish civilization while a lion patiently follows them around until Tarzan rescues them. Its played for laughs, but hammers home their uselessness. 

William Clayton isn't a bad man, but he's something of a fop and a soft fellow who wilts when real pressure arises. Civilization has made him weak. The only people, white or black, who aren't treated as weak or villainous are Tarzan, his dead parents, Jane Porter, and Lieutenant D'Arnot, a French officer who shows up later in the book to help Tarzan enter into Western Civilization.

Action sequences remain a highlight of Burroughs' style, with a believable escalation from Tarzan killing a gorilla with a rusty knife at the age of 10 to driving a car and swinging around Wisconsin in the middle of a forest fire. That happens, and the road to how Tarzan gets from point a to point b is a roaring good time, and it ends on one hell of a cliffhanger.

If it were just a solid action-adventure story, it would be worth it, but Burroughs works in some deep thinking as well that adds another dimension to the story.

Absolutely recommended.

That glorious Neal Adams cover art from the 70s deserves its own showcase. Wowza.

The Sad, Slow Death of Playboy

Its like the stars aligned to find the perfect cover for this essay

So Playboy is going to a quarterly format. 

Its been interesting seeing the slow decline of the once-mighty sultan of smut over the years. Failure to adapt to the rise of high-speed internet sealed its eventual fate in the 00s; but then the company went private in 2011; founder Hugh Hefner became less and less involved with the company as he grew older and older; the investment team that helped take Playboy private, Rizvi Traverse, bought up 60 percent of the stock while Hef was alive; then made the decision to remove nude models from the magazine in 2015 to “focus on hard-hitting journalism and ground breaking interviews.”

That was a disaster that drove away long-term subscribers and in early 2017 Playboy reversed that decision, but didn't go back to full frontal. 

Hefner died in 2017 and Rizvi Traverse bought out the rest of the company's stocks.

At this point, the value of Playboy is as a Brand. A logo that can be placed on merchandise and sold. Nobody really seems to care about the magazine itself anymore, and the first article linked above says that it sells a paltry couple hundred thousand copies per issue. But if nobody cares about the product itself, nobody's going to care about the Brand.

Say what you will about the moral value (or lack thereof) of the King of Nudie Mags, but it was a success story dating back to when Eisenhower was president. It found an audience and catered to it, and expanded to an instantly recognizable brand. It was smut for men who wanted to feel sophisticated, and the photo layouts reflected that. Would-be rivals like Penthouse and Hustler rose up to cater to men who wanted more explicit photos, but Playboy itself continued on with its mystique of glamour.

Glamour was key to Playboy's lasting success. Sure it had interviews, articles and short stories that drew praise here and there, but the core of it was selling the idealized vision of the female body. From the lighting to the costuming to the hair to the makeup to even the airbrushing, Playboy tried to elevate its pictorials to more than the sum of its dirty parts. What it sold, was the dream of Beauty. It was what your dad and your granddad would “read.” It was an American institution, and a time capsule of what men found attractive over the last half-century. “Entertainment for Men.” It was spelled out right on the cover.

Its no surprise that the standard-bearer for the Sexual Revolution would lose its loyal audience when it covered up its centerfolds. Its also no surprise that its struggling to stay alive or even just relevant when the internet offers whatever nudie pics you could want, even glamorous softcore inspired by Playboy itself. Penthouse has gone through several bankruptcies and buyouts over the years (and produced Caligula), but its still committed to its identity as the racier version of Playboy, and will probably outlive it.

Oh hey, its Norm Macdonald. He's having a rough week too.

What is clear is that Playboy itself is effectively dead, and has been for a while. The guy in overall charge of it, Ben Kohn “was never a fan of the magazine.” That makes about as much sense as making someone who never liked Star Wars in charge... of... Lucasfilm. 

Its almost like there's a pattern here. 

Pre-Tolkien Fantasy: The Abominations of Yondo and The Voice in the Night

Finishing up the Pre-Tolkien FantasyChallenge, I'm going to roll the last 2 reviews into because the stories are quite short.

Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was considered one of the Big Three writers of Weird Tales (the others being his friends Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft). Despite outliving either of them, he's fallen into relative obscurity, despite his contributions to both Lovecraftian Horror and Sword & Sorcery.

The Abominations of Yondo was published in April, 1926 in Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, a California-based magazine with publication going back to 1868. It had published such authors as Mark Twain, Bret Harte (who was its Editor in Chief during its early years), Willa Cather, Jack London and John Muir. In short, it was respectable.

The nameless narrator of Abominations finds himself released into the desolate wasteland of Yondo by the cruel Inquisitors of Ong. Having been tortured for an unknown blasphemy, he narrates his journeys through a strange desert and his encounters with weird creatures, broken ruins, and horrifying monsters until his resolve breaks and he flees back the way he came.

This is mood piece, and a strong one at that. We have no idea who the narrator is, nor what his crime was. Ong is described as a lion-headed god, but that's all we learn about him or his Inquisition. The occupants of Yondo are even weirder in this wasteland at the literal edge of the world. Who they are, what they are, and why they are is all left to the reader's imagination as the narrator flees through this nightmare world.

There is absolutely nothing comparable to “standard” Tolkien-derivative fantasy within it, but the monsters are maddeningly Lovecraftian, while the cult of Ong would fit right in with Howard's Hyborean Age.

Finding a good cover of this specific issue of Blue Book was not feasible, so here's the Toho movie poster instead. 

The Voice in the Night was published in the November 1907 issue of Blue Book Magazine (essentially Redbook's cooler sibling that ceased publication in 1975, and a competitor of Argosy). Its author, William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an adventurous figure in his own right. Sailor, bodybuilder, and photographer, he returned to England and enlisted during World War I and was killed in action at the Fourth Battle of Ypres at the age of 40.

Like many of his short stories, The Voice in the Night is set at sea, where land-based humans are especially vulnerable. In it, the crew of a schooner in the North Pacific are hailed by a rowboat begging for food. When the narrator tries to shine his light out, the rowboat paddles out of view. Promising to put away the light, the captain of the schooner sends out a box of foodstuffs. The mysterious rower returns, and relates his sad story.

He and his fiancee were abandoned by the crew of their ship and forced to make a raft. Coming upon an island covered in strange gray fungi, they also find a derelict ship moored there. The fungus grew on the ship in tall piles, but they were able to survive on the ships' stores for a while. Until the fungus started growing on them. Whenever they clean it off, it grows back. Fleeing to a patch of beach untouched by the fungus, but overcome by hunger, both eat some of it, and find it difficult to resist eating it.

Realizing that they cannot ever return to civilization because of how contagious this stuff is, they resolve to quietly meet their fate on the island, and the rower commends the crew of the schooner to God for their generosity toward him and his fiancee. In the morning light, the narrator on the schooner catches a glimpse of the rower as a covered in gray fungal growths and barely recognizable as human.

Addictive gray fungus with unstoppable growth that ultimately consumes whatever it grows on is horrifying enough, but there's a deep layer of Christianity that gives the doomed couple dignity. When approached by the ship, the man actively avoids coming into contact with them, to avoid contamination. When the fiancee is infected, she knows they can't leave the island for the good of humanity. Rescue is impossible, but the two face their impending deaths with a signature British stiff upper lip and belief in the ultimate mercy of God.

Just imagine anything like that getting released through a major traditional publisher these days.

Curiously enough, The Voice in the Night would serve as the basis for the 1963 Ishiro “I Created Godzilla” Honda movie Matango.

Liberties... were taken.

What's been most interesting to me about this exercise has been in how the lines of what is "Fantasy" get blurred the further back in time you go. Weird fiction, horror, ghost stories; those are all integral parts of what Fantasy is. Tolkien certainly knew this when creating Middle-Earth, but he wrote The Lord of the Rings in a conscious effort to create a quintessentially English Epic (in the Beowulf sense). Magic was weird and rare in his works, but the dwarves and elves and hobbits and orcs are, basically, people. They have histories and cultures, songs and art. They're funny-looking humans, in a lot of ways. 

That's fine, because Tolkien was a smart guy and knew that what he was doing was the exception, and not the rule. Fantasy itself is a no-limits kind of genre. Everything is possible within it, if its presented convincingly enough. 

The problem arises from those who wanted to be the next Tolkien. Ponderous doorstoppers with twenty book series that lie unfinished at their creators' deaths, Dry and dusty histories of the world and long names with gratuitous hyphens and apostrophes chained within them. The elves, and the dwarves, and the orcs, and the hobbitshalflings are all pretty much the same as how Tolkien wrote them but without the weightiness. And with Tolkien undergoing the slow process of erasure by the Modernists that poison the genre, the way forward isn't through the evolutionary cul-de-sac of Epic Fantasy that would like to forget its own founding father for the sin of being Catholic. 

It needs to reclaim horror from the ghetto of jump scares and generic serial killers. Fantasy needs to start telling more ghost stories and unexplained just-so stories. If Fantasy is to grow, it needs to get WEIRD again.