Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man

“STILL A WILD BEAST AT HEART”

EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS AND THE DREAM OF TARZAN

In March 1912, at the beginning of his career as a popular author, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote to a magazine editor with his latest idea for a yarn:

The story I am on now is of the scion of a noble English house—of the present time—who was born in tropical Africa where his parents died when he was about a year old. The infant was found and adopted by a huge she-ape, and was brought up among a band of fierce anthropoids.

The mental development of this ape-man in spite of every handicap of how he learned to read English without knowledge of the spoken language, of the way in which his inherent reasoning faculties lifted him high above his savage jungle friends and enemies, of his meeting with a white girl, how he came at last to civilization and to his own[,] makes most fascinating writing and I think will prove interesting reading, as I am especially adapted to the building of the “damphool” species of narrative.¹

It was, the editor replied, a “crackerjack” idea. “You certainly have the most remarkable imagination.”²

When Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes he was thirty-six years old, married with two young children, and living in Chicago, the city of his birth. He was a sturdy though not especially imposing man, roughly five feet nine inches tall, with strong arms and hands.³ Far from living a life of rugged individualism, he worked in a minor position, giving professional advice to clients for System, “The Magazine of Business.” “I knew little or nothing about business,” Burroughs later recalled, “had failed in every enterprise I had ever attempted and could not have given valuable advice to a peanut vendor.” To mesmerize clients, he took refuge in vague, portentous pronouncements and impressive if irrelevant charts and graphs. “Ethically,” he admitted, “it was about two steps below the patent medicine business,” in which he had also worked until the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Law in 1906 shut the enterprise down. To make matters worse, his boss was, in Burroughs’s words, “an overbearing, egotistical ass with the business morality of a peep show proprietor.”⁴

Burroughs thus wrote Tarzan as an act of self-liberation. He hoped to cast off the humiliations of a frustrated, insignificant white-collar worker for the independence of a commercial author with a mass readership. But more than merely a means of making money, the story, he hoped, would serve as an imaginative escape for himself and his readers. After he had become one of the most widely read (if never the highest paid) writers of his day, he made this point explicit. Speaking of the appeal of the Tarzan stories, he declared:

We wish to escape not alone the narrow confines of city streets for the freedom of the wilderness, but the restrictions of man made laws, and the inhibitions that society has placed upon us. We like to picture ourselves as roaming free, the lords of ourselves and of our world; in other words, we would each like to be Tarzan. At least I would; I admit it.⁵

In his own way, then, Burroughs was as much an escape artist as Houdini. The Tarzan escape emphasized not only freedom but also wildness, not only challenge but also combat, and it proved one of the twentieth century’s most popular and durable, performed by Burroughs himself in twenty-three additional Tarzan books, which were translated into a host of languages, as well as in magazine articles and newspaper serials, and by others in films, radio and television programs, cartoons, games, and toys.

As Tarzan carried escape art into the realm of fictional adventure, his body recalled Sandow’s. Tarzan represented Burroughs’s conception of the perfect man, a spectacular nude figure of strength, beauty, virility, violence, and command who extended many of the themes popularized by Sandow. Like Sandow’s feats and Houdini’s escapes, Burroughs’s creation must be understood in historical context. Ubiquitous as the name Tarzan has become, the circumstances of his creation have been largely forgotten. If, however, we see both Burroughs’s situation and his protagonist’s in historical context, then we also see more clearly the pressures on manhood in the modern world and the urge to recover a primitive freedom and wildness.

BURROUGHS’S BELATEDNESS

Edgar Rice Burroughs never invited the confusion between creator and character that, as vaudeville headliners, Sandow and Houdini did. Instead, he was always acutely conscious of the gulf between his life as an author and the adventures of his alter ego, Tarzan. He was still more aware that until he was nearly thirty-six (an age at which the major portion of Sandow’s and Houdini’s careers was over) he was not a writer at all and might easily have never written a word of the Tarzan books or the other sixty-eight books, numerous short stories, and articles that he composed before his death in 1950. Had he died in the summer of 1911, just as he attempted his first professional fiction and five months before he started Tarzan of the Apes, he would have been virtually unknown. Even within his extended family, he may well have been regarded as a disappointment. Certainly he was a failure in his own eyes.

“Nothing interesting ever happened to me in my life,” Burroughs wrote in 1929, in the midst of his success. “I never went to a fire but that it was out before I arrived. None of my adventures ever happened. They should have because I went places and did things that invited disaster; yet the results were always blah.”⁶ This sense of belatedness, which his rueful humor could not disguise, dogged Burroughs from his childhood. Like many men who came of age in the 1880s and 1890s, he seemed born too late. The great adventures of his father’s generation, even of his elder brothers’, were over before he came on the scene. If young Ehrich Weiss had to struggle against the undertow of his father’s decline, young Ed Burroughs felt the pressure to match his father’s success. The very first sentence of the unfinished autobiography in which he bemoaned his unexciting life declared, “My father, Major George T. Burroughs, was a cavalry officer during the Civil War.”⁷ George Burroughs’s early adult life certainly did not lack excitement. As part of the Union troops at Bull Run, he had felt a bullet pierce his blouse but, fortunately, not his skin. Four years later, with his new wife, Mary, he watched the bombardment of Richmond in April 1865, and left the service as a brevet major. Three years later he moved his family to Chicago, unquestionably the greatest American city for adventure in the late nineteenth century. In 1871, from the roof of their West Side townhouse near fashionable Union Park, he saw the most calamitous fire in American history tear through the heart of the city. Seizing on Chicago’s position as the capital of the nation’s grain market, George Burroughs entered the distillery business and quickly grew wealthy. After a fire in 1885 devastated his distillery, he shifted his enterprise to the American Battery Company, which made storage batteries, and ultimately assumed the position of president.

Ed Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875 (one year after Houdini, eight years after Sandow), into a decidedly masculine household. Three elder brothers—ages nine, eight, and three—loomed over him. Two other brothers who died in infancy cast shadows as well: Arthur, born in 1874, who survived only twelve days; and Charles, almost six years younger than Ed, who lived five months. “The earliest event in my life that I can recall clearly,” Burroughs later said, “is the sudden death of an infant brother in my mother’s arms.”⁸ As the youngest surviving child, Ed aroused considerable anxiety with his boyhood illnesses, which tightened his close bonds to his mother. He made up his first stories and told them to her during the times when he was confined to bed. Burroughs’s father valued a strict Victorian order in his household: meals were punctually served to the sound of a gong; all lights were extinguished when he went to bed. So too did he favor a conservative order in society at large. A staunch Republican, as his son would become in his turn, he attended the trial of the Haymarket bombers in 1887 and received a special permit to witness their execution as the city trembled in fear of violent insurrection—another great if grim adventure.⁹

Ed grew up a straggler, always far to the rear of his father’s expectations and his brothers’ example. In stature and in substance, he never seemed to measure up. His father stood six feet high, and his brothers were tall as well. The two eldest, George and Harry, graduated from Yale in 1889 and dutifully joined their father at American Battery. Almost immediately, however, Harry developed a serious cough from battery fumes, and a physician recommended a change of climate. The tonic of ranch life in the West was the great restorative for many men at this time, including Theodore Roosevelt, the novelist Owen Wister, and the painter Frederic Remington. The two brothers teamed up with a Yale classmate, Lew Sweetser, whose father and uncle ranked among the leading cattle barons in Idaho; backed by their respective fathers, the young men bought land for a cattle ranch in the southeastern portion of the newly admitted state. In the spring of 1892, sixteen-year-old Ed joined his brothers in what was certainly the most exhilarating six months of his youth. Sent west to escape an influenza epidemic, he seemed to step into the pages of a dime novel. Although the romantic days of the great cattle drives had waned, he could at least bask in their afterglow. He joined in roundups, learned to ride all day and all night, and returned brimming with stories of ornery horses (including one that “Sandow himself could not have held … when he took it into his head to bolt“) and”likable murderers.”¹⁰

He at least glimpsed possibilities of self-transformation as well. A photograph from the time shows him looking at the photographer with the cockiness of a young cowboy, bulked up by his western garb, hand on hip, broad-brimmed hat shading his eyes as if the photographer’s studio were a dusty street in Dodge City.

Ed’s father wanted less rambunctious models for his youngest son, however. He shipped Ed off to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where another older brother, Coleman, was already enrolled. Ed flunked out after a single semester. His father then sent him to Michigan Military Academy, where Ed chafed under the tight discipline. As a plebe, he excelled chiefly in devising pranks and accumulating punishments. He rode in cavalry drill and played football, exaggerating his height by an inch and a half in a team description. He studied not only military tactics and mathematics but languages and literature as well. A drawing he made of Joan of Arc on the flyleaf of his French text gives us a glimpse of his inner imaginings. No slight maid, she is a formidable woman warrior with massive iron breastplates, an hourglass waist, ample thighs, and a conspicuously phallic sword dripping with blood.

Once Burroughs was graduated from Michigan Military Academy in 1895, it was time to gallop on a career, and though he had become an excellent rider, in this effort he found himself bucked and thrown again and again. The military offered the most obvious course, one that might please his father as well as fulfill his own youthful dreams. So when Burroughs failed the examination for West Point (as did the great majority of applicants), the wound to his pride cut deep. He returned briefly to Michigan Military Academy as assistant commandant. Then with impulsive bravado he enlisted in the army, requesting a cavalry assignment in “the worst post in the United States.”¹¹ He got his wish and quickly regretted it. Burroughs may have thought he could recapture his father’s Civil War experience and also the Western cavalry’s glory days (gained at horrific cost to Plains Indians) as he rose in the ranks. But despite occasional chases of renegade Apaches, garrison duty at the Seventh U.S. Cavalry at Fort Grant in the Arizona Territory resembled convict labor far more than it did Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. After a bout of dysentery, Burroughs called on his father to pull the necessary strings to gain an early discharge. His military career had lasted ten months.

From 1897 until the appearance of Tarzan of the Apes in The All-Story magazine fifteen years later, Burroughs seemed inexorably pulled back to Chicago and to the world of business, try as he might to escape it. He took up his harness at American Battery under his father. A year later, when the Spanish-American War broke out in Cuba, he sought a commission. At one point he wrote directly to Theodore Roosevelt to join his Rough Riders, but he was turned down. (His dreams of military glory died hard: as late as 1906 he was inquiring about a position in the Chinese army.) Seeking then the escape route of his elder brothers and to recover the intoxicating summer of his adolescence, he returned on several occasions to Idaho—only to discover that his brothers’ cattle and gold-dredging operations represented not frontier adventure but a financial noose tightening around their necks. He briefly ran a stationery shop in Pocatello, Idaho, then gladly sold it back to its previous owner, concluding, “God never intended me for a retail merchant.”¹² His marriage in 1900 to Emma Hulbert, daughter of a prominent Chicago hotel manager, only increased the pressures of career. He made a final attempt to fit into his father’s designs at American Battery, where he served as treasurer, then fled west once again, with his wife, in an abortive effort to start a new life with his brothers or on his own. Even two decades later, he wrote, “It gives me a distinct sensation of nausea, accompanied by acute depression every time I think of my experience at the plant.” He added sarcastically, “I have about the same pleasant recollections of each and every business connection I had in the past.”¹³

Back in Chicago after 1904, Burroughs struggled like a character in an O. Henry short story or, more desperately, a Dreiser novel to stay afloat amid the hordes of scrambling white-collar workers who by the end of the decade represented one-fifth of the entire male labor force.¹⁴ He started as timekeeper on a construction site, then took “a series of horrible jobs” as salesman. “I sold electric light bulbs to janitors, candy to drug stores and [multivolume sets of the author John L.] Stoddard’s Lectures from door to door … . My main object in life was to get my foot in somebody’s door and then recite my sales talk like a sick parrot.”¹⁵ He put in longer stints as an office manager for one firm and then “as a very minor cog in the machinery” of Sears, Roebuck’s enormous mail-order business, supervising a large group of (mostly female) stenographers as they cranked out thousands of letters a day.¹⁶ None of these positions suited his restless, independent nature. Attempts to start a small business and thrive as his father had done—in advertising, patent medicine, a correspondence course in “scientific salesmanship”—all failed miserably. The birth of his first two children in 1908 and 1909 quickened his downward plunge. He felt near bottom, financially and emotionally. “I had worked steadily for six years without a vacation,” he later wrote, “and for fully half of my working hours … I had suffered tortures from headaches. Economize as we would, the expenses of our little family were far beyond our income. Three cents worth of ginger snaps constituted my daily lunches for months.” He pawned his wife’s jewelry and his watch to buy food. He “loathed poverty” and loathed himself for being in it. With the damning judgment of a conservative businessman, he wrote: “It is an indication of inefficiency, and nothing more.”¹⁷

Burroughs’s frustrations were shared by countless millions; indeed, they would become a prominent theme in twentieth-century American literature: from Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie to Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. Willy Loman’s son Biff voiced them at mid-century in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman when he exclaims: “It’s a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella.”¹⁸

Burroughs tried other, almost parodically marginal businesses with no better success: a sales agency for lead-pencil sharpeners; then, under his brother Coleman, a manufacturer of scratch pads. In the office doldrums, he tried another moneymaking scheme that might have seemed still more chimerical: writing commercial fiction for the “pulps.”

Pulp magazines were so called because of the inexpensive, porous paper on which they were printed. They specialized in stories that were formulaic concoctions, long on twisting plot, offered in doublecolumned monthly installments to a mass readership. Tales of adventure, mystery, war, the Wild West, and science fiction were their stock-in-trade. These attracted a predominantly male following of adolescent boys and both blue- and white-collar men, as well as a significant number of women, as readers’ letters attest. They were read at home, especially on Sundays, while traveling to and from work, and in idle moments on the job. In some respects, writers for the pulps might be compared to performers in the small-time vaudeville in which Harry Houdini began his career. Both worked hard for low wages and tried to entertain a diverse, unpretentious public. If vaudeville was industrialized in its specialized acts, systematized format, and centralized management, pulp magazines were fiction factories dominated by big publishers that demanded from authors a combination of literary facility, stamina, and speed. Pulp writers received as little as a tenth of a cent per word. And just as small-time vaudevillians dreamed of hitting the big-time houses, many pulp writers aspired to break into the “slicks,” the more prestigious mass-circulation magazines printed on smooth stock, such as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, that paid thousands of dollars for a single story. Vaudeville achieved its height between the 1890s and the Great War. But as successors to the cheap story papers of the nineteenth century, pulp magazines early in the second decade of the twentieth century were just entering their golden age, which continued through the 1930s.¹⁹

Burroughs himself derided pulp fiction and claimed to have stooped to it only because he needed the money. Keenly aware of the divide between “good” literature addressing a “gentle reader” and sensational fiction with no cultural pretensions, he knew that the pulps were not aesthetically respectable. In fact, he said he became acquainted with their contents by happenstance, though his quick mastery of their formulas suggests a longer and deeper acquaintance. Because one of his shaky business ventures took advertising in their pages, the office received copies of magazines to check the ads. Burroughs brought some of them home to read. “It was at that time,” he later recalled, “that I made up my mind that if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines that I could write stories just as rotten.”²⁰

His first novel, A Princess of Mars, begun in July 1911 on leftover stationery from his failed enterprises, portrays the adventures of John Carter, a Virginia gentleman, Civil War veteran, and Indian fighter who falls into a trance in Arizona and wakes up on Mars. Carter was a kind of dream self into whom Burroughs poured many of the masculine endowments and accomplishments he most admired:

a splendid specimen of manhood, standing a good two inches over six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with the carriage of the trained fighting man. His features were regular and clear cut, his hair black and closely cropped, while his eyes were a steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative. His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a typical southern gentleman of the highest type.

His Mars is inhabited by two races: a reddish one, who resemble earthly humans; and a hideous green one, whose warriors are fifteen feet tall, with an extra set of limbs and curved tusks. Except for ornaments, all go naked, as does Carter himself. He soon falls in love with a beautiful copper-skinned princess, and the first-person account describes his swashbuckling adventures on behalf of her and her people as he seeks to save her from the cruel, lustful monster who commands the green race. Finally, after slaying multitudes and proving himself the finest warrior on the planet, he has the satisfactions of restoring order, being proclaimed a hero, and marrying the princess. “Was there ever such a man!” she marvels. “Alone, a stranger, hunted, threatened, persecuted, you have done in a few short months what in all the past ages [on Mars] … no man has ever done.” Though the tale ends on a note of longing, its great theme is manly triumph both in combat and in romance.²¹

So self-conscious was Burroughs about setting down such an extravagant fantasy and about being a writer at all that he wrote surreptitiously and under the pen name Normal Bean (that is, normal brain). He sent the first forty-three thousand words of the story to the editors of The Argosy, one of several magazines in the publishing stable of Frank Munsey, the man who started the modern pulp-magazine revolution. Ten days later, he received a highly encouraging letter from Thomas Mletcalf, an editor of The All-Story, a sister publication. Spurred by Metcalf, Burroughs finished the story the following month and sold it for four hundred dollars. This amounted to barely more than half a cent a word, but in his autobiographical sketch Burroughs still savored the thrill of this, “the first big event in my life.”²²

Clearly, such writing tapped both a talent and a need in Burroughs. Aside from a crude “historical fairy-tale” called “Minidoka” that he had concocted for his nephew and niece in Idaho a decade earlier, he appears not to have written fiction before and certainly none of any length. Now it seemed he could not stop. Already, while Metcalf deliberated over the Martian romance, Burroughs wrote a second novel-length story, a medieval swashbuckler called “The Outlaw of Torn.” Then, with an office manager’s precision, he noted that on December 1, 1911, at eight in the evening he began to write the novel that would become Tarzan of the Apes.

MANLINESS IN THE PAGES OF SYSTEM

To appreciate fully the meaning of Burroughs’s dreams of manly triumph in Africa, we should first look more closely at the magazine he so eagerly left to plunge into pulp fiction. After the scratch-pad business, like the lead-pencil sharpener agency, collapsed, Burroughs took what turned out to be his last job other than that as a self-employed writer. From shortly after he began writing stories in the summer of 1911 until early in 1913, when he felt his sales could support his growing family, he worked as manager of the business service department of System, a business magazine run by A. W. Shaw. Though Burroughs had almost nothing good to say about any business in which he worked, the experience at System aroused by far his sharpest invective. “I never so thoroughly disliked any employer as I did Shaw,” he remembered, as if rubbing a wound that refused to heal. Perhaps at the root of Burroughs’s disgust lay his sense of fraudulence and incompetence in dispensing business advice in response to individual requests, a service the magazine provided for an annual fee of fifty dollars. “I recall one milling company in Minneapolis or St. Paul who submitted a bunch of intricate business problems for me to solve. Had God asked me to tell Him how to run heaven, I would have known just as much about it.” His boss’s indifference to Burroughs’s lack of qualifications only confirmed the fraud. Burroughs scornfully remembered, “Shaw also had a young man about nineteen giving advice to bankers. This lad’s banking experience consisted in his having beaten his way around the world.”²³

In three crucial respects, System was the mirror image of the masculine world of pulp magazines in which Burroughs sought refuge and profit. First, to a startling degree, issues of manliness suffused its depiction of modern business. To read its pages is to discover an ethic of intense work and competition that both shaped and repelled Burroughs—to discover, that is, the “iron cage,” in the sociologist Max Weber’s phrase, from which he strove to escape.²⁴ If magazines such as The All-Story divulged a world of primarily (though not exclusively) masculine fantasy, offering satisfactions denied on the job, System presented an alternative world in which masculine adventure lay at the core of business competition. Second, System proposed a hierarchy of masculine worth and ability that emerged from competition. Whether this hierarchy was due to differences in training and environment or innate differences (an issue that Burroughs explored in Tarzan of the Apes) was a question to which it offered an equivocal response. Third, System was also a magazine of stories. Though all the incidents described in its articles were allegedly true, much of the writing was either about decisive actions that businessmen had taken or about tales of adventure in the context of modern business.

Many of the narrative devices in the System articles borrowed from fiction. A problem would be introduced by a remark or exchange in direct, “manly” speech, and the story then proceeded with rapid paced action to a clear outcome with a business moral. This was not a magazine concerned primarily with impersonal business processes and economic forces, though it did promise to extract underlying principles that readers could apply to their own situations. Rather, it concerned men who had the power to assess problems, chart their courses, and control events, coming out on top as one of the “big men.” One might well suspect that writers contrived details, concocted dialogue, occasionally invented an informant, or even made up much of the supposedly true accounts of business advice. But even if authentic to the last detail, its stories shared a clear house style designed to appeal to readers seeking entertainment as well as information.

The November 1911 issue of System is one which Burroughs would have seen and, quite possibly, read just as he prepared to put his first Tarzan story on paper. Consider the title. “System” was a word that glittered with magic in the early twentieth century. It carried the promise of a scientific modern order. New system builders were eager to apply methods of rationalization, coordination, centralization, and supervision to ever-larger organizations of people and machines, including vast new office bureaucracies, immense factories, and far-flung financial empires. By this time, the great investment banker J. Pierpont Morgan, Jr., had consolidated and expanded corporations such as United States Steel (1901), International Harvester (1902), and American Telephone and Telegraph (1906). In 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor, articulating his vision of maximum industrial efficiency, declared, “In the past, the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.” In Highland Park, Michigan, Henry Ford was developing his revolutionary system of production for the Model T car. The skyscraper was the cathedral of this emerging corporate order, the modern electrified factory its palace. And regimented, synchronized movement increasingly constituted its dance. At the very same time that Ford was developing his assembly-line system, Broadway choreographers were creating its inverted image in the modern chorus line. “It is system, system, system, with me,” declared a leading choreographer, Ned Wayburn, in 1913. “I believe in numbers and straight lines.”²⁵

How was one to operate within this modern, urban world of business and stand out? The answer of System’s November 1911 issue began on its cover, which shows a crowd, principally of men, walking in a business district. The man in the forefront, more fully drawn than the others, models the characteristics of the exemplary businessman thriving in the urban corporate world. Well dressed but not ostentatious, bowler snug as a helmet, newspaper furled, and walking stick at the ready, he does not need to look at the clock behind him to know that time is money. Unlike the messenger just to the right, or the stoop-shouldered man at the very center retreating down the street, or the boy with hand in pocket walking into the left margin of the picture, he strides full of purpose on his mission.

The opening article offered inspiring accounts of individual business success as part of a series, “Ideas That Have Been Put to Work.” Breathlessly, the piece begins: “In a flying spark that bridged a broken wire, Edison saw not merely a manifestation of electricity, but the possibility of electric light. In the steam escaping from a kettle of water, Watt saw a power that he harnessed for the development of our industries. So many of the world’s greatest ideas have been suggested by trivial observations that have been adapted to the needs of the hour.”²⁶ The article proposed to apply this heroic view of flashing genius to the world of modern business, with vignettes demonstrating breakthroughs using analogical thinking, even as it stressed the importance of interdependence, systematization, standardization, supervision, and expansion. For example, a manufacturer discovers how to make his sales force a more cooperative team by watching a football game. A store manager at the theater notes the use of a revolving stage and realizes he can apply it to his shopwindows, vastly expanding his possibilities of exhibiting goods with a four-part revolving display. A baker learns from the success of packaged laundry starch to emphasize the hygienic values of packaged bread. These are anecdotes about active, decisive, inventive men, often (though not exclusively) attuned to machinery and certainly to organization. They are adult Tom Swifts, eager to scale the business ladder.

“What Are Profits?” asks the next article, at first glance a dusty disquisition by F. W. Taussig of Harvard’s economics department. Its real subject, however, is the meaning of manliness in a modern capitalist society. A leading economist, Taussig was the son of a successful physician and businessman who had immigrated to the United States from Prague. He quickly described the hierarchy of manly achievement in the business world and directly addressed the issue of why some men succeed and others fail:

Some men seem to have a golden touch. Everything to which they turn their hand yields miraculously. They are the captains of industry, the “big men,” admired, feared and followed by the business community. Others, of slightly lower degree, prosper generously, though not so miracutousty—the select class of “solid business men.” Thence, by imperceptible gradations, there is a descent in the industrial and social hierarchy until we reach the small tradesman who is, indeed, a business man, but whose income is modest and whose position is not very different from that of the mechanic or the clerk.

The cover of System, November 1911. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Taussig went on to consider whether such varieties in position stem from “differences in inborn abilities” or from “training and environment.” (If Burroughs were reading, his eyes must have widened with interest.) With some qualifications, Taussig answered that at the highest level they are indeed innate: “Captains of industry are doubtless born. So are great poets, musicians, men of science, lawyers. Though there may be occasional suppressed geniuses among the poorer classes, ability of the highest order usually works its way to the fore.” Not surprisingly, he believed that merit thrives in a laissez-faire economy. Still, for those not touched with genius, he acknowledged, other qualities were critical, including “the advantages of capital and connection,” “imagination and judgment,” administrative ability, “courage,” and a body “vigorous in its capacity to endure prolonged application and severe nervous strain.” Surveying the various types of men who succeeded in the business world, he concluded, “Among all these different sorts of persons, a process very like natural selection is at work.”²⁷ Implicitly, this process affirmed the essential rightness of business and other social hierarchies, which he believed reflected fundamental and progressive hierarchies of nature.

After an item on making money from waste, “What’s Your Scrapheap Worth?” there was a piece by Henry Beach Needham, “How to Select the Right College Man.” One might fairly say that System was fascinated with processes of selection—whether of kinds of scrap or kinds of men—with distinguishing the exceptional individual from the mass. The college article noted that a higher proportion of college men were going into business and quoted business leaders who wanted college graduates for executive positions. (One imagines Burroughs squirming, since he was among the more than 95 percent of American men at this time who never attended college.²⁸) The article at one point casually observed that the college man “has survived [in various capacities in Western Electric] because he is ‘the fittest.’” The Darwinian analogy was clearly becoming a commonplace. Enos Barton, chairman of the board of Western Electric and recently retired as its president, declared, “The college … is a sort of sieve—a coarse sieve wherein the best men are sifted out … . By our method of selection the loafers and the sports are eliminated.”²⁹

In the following piece, “Players in the Great Game,” the subject remains the “big men,” the “men who are factors in the march of progress.” The first figure discussed is Irving T. Bush, who by sticking to one thing (Burroughs squirms again) is worth twenty-six million dollars at the age of forty-three. “Physically, too, Mr. Bush is big—in all some six feet and two inches, with a heart of proportionate size.” He has just given a check for ten thousand dollars to his sales manager. Another “player” in the “Great Game” is Edward R. Stettinius, president of Diamond Match (and later a partner in J. P. Morgan and a key industrialist in the Allied effort during the Great War). He “sits behind his big desk in his big office … . As the conversation progresses, Mr. Stettinius directs it, using a half-burned cigar as a baton … . [H]is movements are quick and vigorous.”³⁰ (Burroughs crunches a gingersnap.)

As a whole, the articles in System depicted a world of big, energetic, masterly leaders—and, implicitly, of smaller, unexceptional followers. It was a view cogently if smugly expressed by one of the largest manufacturers of the day, Cyrus McCormick, Jr., a man born with a silver reaper in his mouth. In answer to a query, “Upon what ideals, policies, programs, or specific purposes should Americans place most stress in the immediate future?” this commander of fifteen thousand workers replied: “Civilization needs leaders, but it is equally essential there should be followers. Nature has so provided that for one man capable of the larger task of brain or brawn, tens of thousands are unequal to it. In the frank recognition of this natural law, and the acceptance of it, and obedience to it, much depends.”³¹

A different but equally telling perspective emerges from the advertising section of System. The advertisements may also be read as narratives of manliness, which directly speak to readers concerned about their inadequacy. No talent is simply innate, they seemed to say; any man can benefit from training, advice, or nostrums. The System articles focused on the “big men,” but the advertisements promised to aid those who had fallen behind. Many offered correspondence courses and other instruction by mail. (Burroughs would hardly have glanced at these, given that one of his many failed ventures had been a correspondence course in “scientific salesmanship.”)

“How big a man are you?” an advertisement for a correspondence school in System, November 1911. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“Walled in, Old Man?” an advertisement in System, November 1911. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“How big a man are you?” one ad demanded. A large, prosperous, and distinguished-looking man, with his suit coat open to reveal a vest and massive watch chain and with his hand cradling a watch, stands staring down on a smaller, thinner, halding, rumpled, and rather cringing figure. The copy declared: “Your weekly pay envelope will answer this question. The dollars per week you earn prove your bigness or littleness—your importance or unimportance—whether trained or untrained.” The American School of Correspondence promised to make the difference.

Helping hands stretch forth in other advertisements for similar services. “Walled In, Old Man?” inquires one in which a clerk sits on his stool, shut in a corner of high brick walls, while from the top of the picture a strong hand reaches down. “Grasp the helping hand that has lifted thousands from the High Stool of Salaried Uncertainty to the Arm Chair of Successful Business Ownership.” “Go,” exhorts another as a man in suit and tie helps a more modestly dressed man up a rocky, thorny slope, and, by implication, to an office desk and a solidly middle-class life.

“Go,” an advertisement for another correspondence school in System, November 1911. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Burroughs wanted to escape his job at System and the entire world it represented—in many respects, the world of his father’s values, honed to a sharp competitive edge—but he was profoundly shaped by it. And though he claimed to hate business, he approached his new career in commercial fiction like a character out of the pages of System. The magazine celebrated charts and graphs as indexes of scientific efficiency, and from the time he began writing, Burroughs kept a graph of his word output over his desk. (It quickly rose to a peak in 1913, the first year he wrote full-time, with 413,000 words.³²) He proved a canny bargainer with magazine editors, publishers, and film companies; a shrewd marketer of syndication and subsidiary rights; and, beginning in 1923, the successful owner of his own corporation, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

The story that made this new career possible was Tarzan of the Apes. Writing it, Burroughs discovered his potential as a commercial author and the possibility of a new life (his unpublished autobiography essentially ends with this new birth). More important, he discovered a rich cluster of themes with immense cultural as well as personal resonance. Their continuing fascination contributes much to Tarzan’s enduring fame.

MASCULINE REVITALIZATION AND THE REASSERTION OF HIERARCHY

On every side in the early twentieth century, age-old questions about the basis of individual merit and social hierarchy demanded new answers. Reformers and radicals of various stripes questioned the legitimacy of special privilege and entrenched power. Swept by a flood tide of immigrants, the nation swirled with an unprecedented diversity of ethnicities, religions, and cultures. Extremes of wealth and poverty, power and impotence challenged egalitarian beliefs. The sense that American society was a sharp pyramid, with figures scrambling to reach its summit or at least advance up its steep slopes—the idea projected in the pages of System—pervaded all classes. Those who felt themselves rightfully on top strenuously justified their positions by appeals to hierarchies, particularly those of race (whiteness), gender (masculinity), religion (Protestant Christianity), and putative superiority of body, mind, character, and merit, and they did their best to repel all radical and leveling forces. From their high fortresses, they rolled boulders down on new immigrants, African Americans, agrarian and industrial radicals, feminists, socialists, and anarchists.

Yet their assaults were not merely defensive. The contest between conservatives and reformers over the shape of the American social and economic order took place against a larger international backdrop in which new hierarchies were being violently asserted. Burroughs’s generation had grown up during the great wave of European imperial expansion, when a fifth of the world’s landmass (excluding Antarctica) and a tenth of its population had been seized by European powers, great and small. Britain, whose national symbol, appropriately, was the lion, claimed the largest share: one-quarter of the land and one-third of the people on the globe.³³ With the United States’ own frontier exhausted, the excitement of a new global land rush with immense prizes to the victors was hard for many Americans to resist.

Particularly in the flush of the nation’s triumph in the Spanish-American War, expansionists jubilantly proposed to revitalize their numbers by carrying the battle to new realms of empire. The Indiana Republican Albert Beveridge perfectly captured this spirit in his jingoistic paean on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1899: “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns … . He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.” “We will renew our youth at the fountain of new and glorious deeds,” Beveridge declared. Here was “system” with a vengeance.³⁴

This dream of white Anglo-American revitalization and conquest not only transformed American foreign relations; it also profoundly affected American thinking, as is evident in popular fiction. Conspicuous in many popular novels of the early twentieth century are concerns with what might be called geographies of rugged masculinity: regions within which white men of northern European stock reassert their dominance over physical and moral “inferiors,” including incompetents, malefactors, weaklings, and cowards.

One such realm was the West, in which Owen Wister placed his immensely popular and influential novel The Virginian (1902). A historical romance, the story celebrates the adventures of a homegrown noble savage, “a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures,” who is twice compared to a Bengal tiger. Like so many Westerns (and, as we shall see, other works), it both glories in wildness as the basis of masculine freedom and insists on the necessity of imposing social order. In the heyday of the cowboy in the Wyoming territory, that order was established by the individual man. The code of this society is simple: whether in bets, card games, or horse trades, “a man must take care of himself.” If this code is violated, the gun and the rope are the modes of redress, lynch law and the duel the courts of justice. As the title character declares, “[E]quality is a great big bluff … . [A] man has got to prove himself my equal before I’ll believe him.” Being equal to the occasion is the only kind of equality that counts. Burroughs, who did not remark on many literary works, called The Virginian “one of the greatest American novels ever written.”³⁵

If the Western was one popular genre of masculine adventure, what might be called the Southern became another. Here the most influential work was Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905), a book immediately controversial and now infamous for its vehement espousal of white supremacy and glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. Adapted as a play, it helped to spark wholesale assaults on African Americans in the terrible race riot in Atlanta in 1906. D. W. Griffith created his brilliant, disturbing film version, The Birth of a Nation, in 1915.

The novel has a number of points in common with Wister’s The Virginian: it is also a historical romance with a slender, handsome, raven-haired white Southern hero who reaffirms his manliness in mortal combat in a plot in which lynch law figures conspicuously. Here, too, the story ends with marriages symbolizing the reunion of regions—New England and the West in The Virginian, the North and the South in The Clansman. Unlike The Virginian, however, The Clansman associates wildness and animality not with natural nobility but with African American savagery and immorality. The most flagrant instance occurs in Dixon’s description of the rape of a white Southern virgin by the evil mulatto Gus. The author could not decide which wild beast to invoke:

Gus stepped closer, with an ugly leer, his flat nose dilated, his sinister bead-eyes wide apart gleaming ape-like as he laughed.

…The girl uttered a cry, long, tremulous, heart-rending, piteous.

A single tiger-spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat and she was still.³⁶

At the novel’s conclusion, of course, the men whom Dixon regarded as the South’s and the nation’s proper white leaders reassert their authority against such usurpers. Anything else, Dixon made clear, would pervert morality, politics, religion, history, and biology. In a fair fight, he believed, their triumph was inevitable: “The breed to which the Southern white man belongs has conquered every foot of soil on this earth their feet have pressed for a thousand years. A handful of them hold in subjection three hundred million in India. Place a dozen of them in the heart of Africa, and they will rule the continent unless you kill them.”³⁷ In Dixon’s fervid imagination, the rise of the “invisible empire” of the KKK was part of the march of visible white empires across the globe.

The far North was a third testing ground of masculinity in the novels and stories of Jack London. A year younger than Burroughs, London had virtually completed his extraordinary career as a writer of popular fiction before Burroughs even got started. He began publishing stories about Alaska in pulp magazines in his early twenties and wrote fifty-one books before his death at the age of forty in 1916. Burroughs both admired London’s fiction and was fascinated by his turbulent life.³⁸ He would certainly have known The Call of the Wild (1903), London’s first great popular success.

Buck, the hero of The Call of the Wild, is a dog rather than a man, a shift in species that allowed London to explore themes of savagery, violence, and primitivism with special power and directness. Half Saint Bernard and half Scotch shepherd, Buck has previously lived as a “sated aristocrat” on a California ranch, “with nothing to do but loaf and be bored.” In the novel’s opening pages, however, he is stolen and sent north to satisfy the demand for sled dogs created by the Klondike gold rush of 1897: “He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.” The fierce demands of the life of a pack dog in the harsh Northland transform him physically, morally, and spiritually:

His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain … . He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and … [build] it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues. Sight and scent became remarkably keen, while his hearing developed such acuteness that in his sleep he heard the faintest sound and knew whether it heralded peace or peril.

At the same time, Buck increasingly recovers the instincts of his wild ancestors and, in reveries, the memory of his primeval companion, early man: “The hairy man could spring up into the trees and travel ahead as fast as on the ground, swinging by the arms from limb to limb, sometimes a dozen feet apart, letting go and catching, never falling, never missing his grip. In fact, he seemed as much at home among the trees as on the ground.” Buck learns to compete in the “ruthless struggle for existence,” “the law of club and fang.” “He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness.”³⁹ Just as the Virginian must ultimately duel the evil cowpuncher Trampas, Buck must engage in a fight to the death with the treacherous husky Spitz. Unalike the Virginian, however, he has no Vermont schoolmarm pleading with him not to fight, and he easily learns to glory in the joy of the kill.

In the course of the story, the Northland pitilessly exposes both animal and human incompetence and weakness. Buck achieves his position as lead dog through his willingness to fight rivals to the death and maintains it through his incomparable strength and sagacity. Dogs are no more created equal in London’s tale than men are in Wister’s.

Like Wister and Dixon, London gave readers a romance, in his case between Buck and his “ideal master,” John Thornton. Thornton, too, has joined the quest for gold, though apparently animated more by delight in the wilderness and joy in the quest than by the riches to be gained. As Buck increasingly responds to the ancestral “call of the wild,” only his love of Thornton holds him back. He hungers for tougher challenges, bigger game. He kills a bear, then a moose, and when he discovers Thornton slain by members of the Yeehat tribe, he kills man, “the noblest game of all.” At the novel’s conclusion, he has been transmuted to legend, the great Ghost Dog fabled by the Yeehats who runs at the head of a wolf pack, “leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world.”⁴⁰

BURROUGHS’S LITERARY EXPERIMENT

When Burroughs dropped his infant “scion of a noble English house” into tropical Africa, another harsh and savage realm that would test the character of modern masculinity, he was adapting a well-known theme. As he later recalled, “I was mainly interested in playing with the idea of a contest between heredity and environment. For this purpose I selected an infant child of a race strongly marked by hereditary characteristics of the finer and nobler sort and at an age at which he could not have been influenced by associations with creatures of his own kind. I threw him into an environment as diametrically opposite that to which he had been born as I might well conceive.”⁴¹

To a conservative white American of Burroughs’s background and training, the jungle of Equatorial Africa brought together the starkest possible conjunction of “primitive” indigenous peoples, exotic wilderness, savage animals, and both noble and venal colonial explorers. Burroughs knew little about Africa at this point and later declared that he wrote Tarzan with the aid of only Henry Stanley’s In Darkest Africa (1890) and a fifty-cent Sears dictionary.⁴² Probably, his deepest direct contact with African culture had occurred on the Midway at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair as he drove by the Dahomey Village in a “horseless surrey” sponsored by his father’s American Battery Company. He would have grown up reading accounts of romantic European explorers, even though he was aware that in the years since his birth, Africa had quickly passed from being the object of the most lofty professions of philanthropy to being the target of the most rapacious imperial greed. More particularly, he would have read extensive newspaper accounts of one of the first modern mass atrocities, the enslavement and death of millions in the Congo Free State under the aegis of King Leopold II of Belgium. Still, Burroughs’s Tarzan remains much more in the tradition of R. M. Ballantyne’s 1862 novel for young readers, The Gorilla Hunters (“I say, boys, isn’t it jolly to be out here living like savages?”), than in that of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902).⁴³ Despite Conrad’s searing depiction of evil at the core of the “civilizing” enterprise, tropical Africa remained in Burroughs’s and the public’s imagination a great arena for white male adventure, one of the last wild places on earth.

To carry the “hereditary characteristics of the finer and nobler sort” into this demanding environment, Burroughs, who took great pride in his Anglo-Saxon ancestry, selected members of the British nobility, John and Alice Clayton, Lord and Lady Greystoke. The story opens in 1888 with John Clayton and his young, pregnant wife bound for West Africa, where he plans to investigate reports that Britain’s native subjects are being exploited and enslaved by another European power (sounding much like Belgium) in pursuit of ivory and rubber. Burroughs cast Clayton from the same mold as his previous hero, John Carter, in A Princess of Mars. Above average height, with a military bearing and regular features, he is “a strong, virile man—mentally, morally, and physically.” By contrast, the crew of the small vessel on which John and Alice sail from Freetown on the West African coast toward their final destination typify the lowest elements of society, socially, morally, biologically. The officers are “coarse, illiterate,” “swarthy bullies” led by a “brute” of a captain, and the crew that mutiny against their thuggish command are even more villainous and animalistic.⁴⁴ In their atavistic appearance and savage proclivities, they virtually step from the pages of Cesare Lombroso’s highly influential Criminal Man.⁴⁵ In Burroughs’s description, their leader, Black Michael, “a huge beast of a man, with fierce black mustachios, and a great bull neck set between massive shoulders,” anticipates the apes that will play such a prominent part in the story. Burroughs poured ice water into Clayton’s veins, allowing him to stroll across the deck of the ship in the midst of the mutiny as casually as he might stroll across the polished floor of a drawing room. After the crew murder the officers, Black Michael sets Lord and Lady Greystoke, together with abundant supplies and provisions, “alone upon … [the] wild and lonely shore,” castaways in a savage land.⁴⁶

In this setting, English nobility and apes alike respond according to their innate abilities and what Burroughs understood as the nature of their sex. “I am but a woman,” Lady Alice admits, “seeing with my heart rather than my head, and all that I can see is too horrible, too unthinkable to put into words.” Lord Greystoke tries to stiffen her upper lip with the reminder that they carry within themselves both the blood of triumphant forebears and the brains of enlightened Victorians: “Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face, possibly in these same primeval forests. That we are here today evidences their victory … . What they accomplished … with instruments and weapons of stone and bone, surely that may we accomplish also.” He erects a strong haven for their little family. Nonetheless, in the trauma of an attack by a bull ape, Lady Alice’s mind gives way. Throughout the first year of their baby son’s life (and the last of their own), she imagines them back in England and their time in Africa as merely a hideous dream. She dies as peacefully as a fading flower. Lord Greystoke, by contrast, is violently murdered by the huge king ape, Kerchak, who has led a cluster of apes to the Greystoke cabin. These apes belong to a species supposedly superior to the gorilla; yet within it, as within the human species, Burroughs emphasized innate differences. Lacking nobility of character, intelligence, or appearance, Kerchak rules over his tribe by virtue of his immense strength and fierce temper: “His forehead was extremely low and receding, his eyes bloodshot, small and close set to his coarse, flat nose; his ears large and thin, but smaller than most of his kind.” By contrast, another member of the raiding party, the she-ape Kala, is “a splendid, clean-limbed animal, with a round, high forehead, which depicted more intelligence than most of her kind possessed.”⁴⁷ Having just lost her offspring, she snatches the Clayton heir from the cradle and claims him for her own. In this way, Burroughs set up a plot with both mythic resonance and modern pertinence. When Kala becomes a mother to the noble waif, a host of issues rushes to the fore of Burroughs’s story: nature and nurture, primate affinities and human capacities, savagery and civilization.

WILD BOYS AND MEN

Tarzan was the exemplary fictitious feral child of Burroughs’s and his readers’ time—as he has remained for the ninety years since. Although the fascination with them is age-old, “wild” children have exerted a special interest for Western societies since the eighteenth century, precisely because they seemed to offer special insight into the relationship between human nature and nurture. When, for example, “a naked, brownish, black-haired creature … about the size of a boy of twelve” emerged from the woods in northern Germany in 1724, the discovery was heralded as “more remarkable than the discovery of Uranus.” He appeared alert and seemed to have especially keen hearing and sense of smell. He did not care for clothes but gradually learned to wear them. Dubbed Wild Peter, he became the pet of the royal house of Hanover, then of the duke of Hanover, King George I of England, and subsequently of his daughter, Princess Caroline. The Scottish physician and writer John Arbuthnot eagerly examined him, hoping that Peter might learn to talk, relate his feral experiences, and thus communicate the nature of the human mind in a pure state, uncontaminated by society. Arbuthnot quickly concluded, however, that Peter was an “imbecile,” incapable of speech due to severe mental retardation. ⁴⁸

In 1799, seventy-five years after the discovery of Wild Peter, another feral boy of similar age was flushed by hunters in the forest near Aveyron in southern France. Like Peter, he was unaccustomed to clothes and did not speak; unlike Peter, he appeared dull rather than acute in all his senses, especially hearing and sight. The next year he was presented in Paris to the young physician Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, who became a pioneer in the education of the deaf and the mentally retarded. Although the Parisian public had flocked to the “savage of Aveyron” expecting to find in him the embodiment of Rousseau’s noble savage, Itard encountered someone quite different: “a disgustingly dirty child affected with spasmodic movements, and often convulsions, who swayed back and forth ceaselessly like certain animals in a zoo, who bit and scratched those who opposed him, who showed no affection for those who took care of him, and who was, in short, indifferent to everything and attentive to nothing.” Itard gave him the name Victor and sought to develop his senses, intellect, and emotions as well as to determine from his deficiencies what humankind owed to education and civilization. He spent five years in this effort, far longer than did Dr. Arbuthnot or any of Peter’s other examiners, and though Itard claimed some successes, Victor remained profoundly a captive of his stunted early life.⁴⁹

More immediate to Burroughs’s time than this pair of “wild” boys were a pair of “wild” men. At the end of August 1911, a few months before Burroughs began writing Tarzan, butchers at a slaughterhouse near Oroville in north-central California discovered a “wild” man cornered by their dogs. Superficially, at least, his situation resembled Wild Peter’s and Victor’s when they were found. Except for a ragged scrap of canvas, which he wore like a poncho, and a frayed undershirt, he was naked. He was also fatigued, frightened, and starving. And he spoke no language that his captors could recognize. He was not a boy of twelve, however, but a man who appeared perhaps sixty years old. (He was, in fact, about fifty.) But the greatest difference that immediately set his case apart from the feral children’s, long before his intelligence could be assessed or his emotional development determined, was race. When the local sheriff arrived, he perceived the “wild” man as an Indian. To hold him and at the same time to shield him from the curious stares of people streaming to the jail at Oroville, the sheriff locked him up in a cell for the insane. Despite this setting, his appeared to be a striking case not of individual isolation and retardation, as with Wild Peter and Victor, but of cultural primitivism and isolation from the modern world. Newspapers trumpeted news of this last wild Indian, a figure who seemed to have stepped directly from the Stone Age into the age of airplanes.⁵⁰

When Alfred Kroeber and Thomas Waterman, two anthropologists at the University of California at Berkeley, read these stories, they thought this “wild” man might be a survivor of the Yahi tribe whose last recorded members had been massacred almost a half century earlier. Two days after the “discovery” of the strange man, Waterman traveled to the Oroville jail. He sat in the inmate’s cell and read down a list of phonetically transcribed Yana words, until at last, with siunini, yellow pine, the man’s face lit up. He was, it gradually emerged, the last surviving member of the Yahi, a southern tribe of the Yana.⁵¹ Almost his entire life, he had lived in concealment as part of a tiny and ever dwindling remnant in the foothills of Mount Lassen. For three years, since the death of his mother, sister, and an old man, he had existed entirely on his own. Now he was officially a ward of the federal government. Wearing a shirt, coat, and trousers provided for him but spurning shoes, he traveled with Waterman by train and ferry from Oroville to San Francisco. Until his death from tuberculosis four and a half years later, he lived in the University of California’s new Anthropological Museum near Golden Gate Park, where he demonstrated Yahi crafts such as arrowhead making on Sunday afternoons and worked as a janitor’s assistant during the week. He never revealed his name, but Kroeber called him Ishi, which means man in Yana.

With his gentle, friendly disposition, Ishi played the role of Rousseauian noble savage far better than had Wild Peter or Victor. His reactions to modern civilization aroused keen interest. Traveling around San Francisco shortly after his arrival, he was unnerved by the crowds. The exclamation “Hansi saltu!” burst from his lips: “Many white people, many white people!”⁵² A few days later, a reporter invited Ishi to attend a vaudeville performance. From his box seat, during the first two acts, Ishi watched the audience exclusively, which to his mind was far more interesting than anything onstage. In time, he learned white San Franciscans’ names for the people around him: “English, Chinaman, Japanese, Wild Indian, Nigger, Irishman, Dutchman, policeman.” He appeared impressed less with airplanes than with technologies nearer at hand and of direct use to him—matches, running water, roller window shades. According to those close to him, he blamed contemporary illnesses on “the excessive amount of time men spent cooped up in automobiles, in offices, and in their own houses. It is not a man’s nature to be too much indoors and especially in his own house with women constantly about,” he believed.⁵³

Ishi appealed to the modern longing for a more rugged, “primitive” existence that would revitalize masculinity. This longing emerged most vividly when he returned to his home ground in May 1914, almost three years after his emergence near Oroville. The impetus for the trip came not from Ishi, who was at first reluctant to revisit the place of his ancestors, but from Kroeber, and Waterman, and their physician-friend Saxon Pope. Ultimately, Ishi agreed, and the outing took on the aspect of a male-bonding retreat as much as an ethnographic study. Once back in his homeland, Ishi, who had refused to be photographed without Western dress in San Francisco, reverted to his native breechcloth. Still he refused to shed clothing entirely, even while swimming, unlike his “civilized” companions, all of whom reveled in their nakedness and the opportunity to “play Indian.” ⁵⁴ As he demonstrated his great skills as hunter and fisherman and his deep reverence for the natural world, he seemed a time traveler from an ancient and alien realm.

Ishi in Oroville, California, August 1911. Photograph by

Hogan. Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of

Anthropology. University of California at Berkeley

Ishi with bow and arrow. Deer Greek, 1914. Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. University of California at Berkeley

The desire to strip off civilization with one’s clothes and to experience primitive life firsthand in contact with nature was, of course, a masculine Romantic impulse that recurred with astonishing force and variety in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—from the French artist Paul Gauguin’s removal to Tahiti to the German nudist movement. In addition, at the time Ishi was discovered, millions of buttoned-up American boys and men were taking to the woods in organizations such as the Sierra Club and the Boy Scouts of America. Ernest Thompson Seton declared, in the first Boy Scout handbook, “Those live longest who live nearest to the ground, … who live the simple life of primitive times, divested, however, of the evils that ignorance in those times begot.” Seton proposed that everyone spend at least one month a year outdoors.⁵⁵

Perhaps the American figure who most grandiosely struck the primitivist pose in this period was a minor Boston illustrator, Joseph Knowles. Beginning in early August 1913, Knowles conducted an “experiment” that both reversed Ishi’s passage from wilderness to modern technological civilization and, more than any contemporary effort, paralleled Edgar Rice Burroughs’s literary experiment in Tarzan of the Apes. What Knowles proposed was to test whether a modern man, stripped naked and without any implements, could enter the woods and live the primitive life successfully, depending solely upon his own individual resources.⁵⁶ The wilderness he chose was not in Equatorial Africa but in darkest Maine, and he was not a noble foundling but an experienced woodsman and guide on the eve of his forty-fourth birthday. Even so, the rather pudgy, cigarette smoking Knowles made an unlikely exemplar of savage virility. The surprising celebrity he achieved testifies to how much a public adapting to modern technological civilization craved the reassurance that the urban white man could face the elements on his own and triumph.

Knowles’s experiment recalls Sandow’s and Houdini’s feats, even as it resonates with Tarzan. Knowles sought the limelight as assiduously as any vaudevillian, though even he was dazzled by his success. As if conducting a Houdini escape, on August 4, 1913, he stripped off his clothes before reporters and photographers near the Spencer Mountains in northeastern Maine, vowing to stay in the wilderness for two months. He had arranged with the Boston Sunday Post to file weekly reports, written with charcoal on birch bark, chronicling his adventures. The week before, Harvard’s Dudley A. Sargent, the physical-culture expert who twenty years earlier accorded Sandow the title “perfect man,” had examined him. The best Sargent could say was that Knowles “showed considerable fat, which will aid him in resisting cold.” Still, the doctor struck exactly the note of cultural urgency that Knowles desired: “There is no question that in our advancement from primeval life we have dropped through disuse a great deal of natural knowledge; our artificial life has robbed us of some of our greatest powers and has stunted others.” Under the circumstances, he applauded Knowles’s “attempt to live like a primeval man” as being of both scientific interest and practical value.⁵⁷

Joseph Knowles stripping for his wilderness experiment, 1913. From Alone in the Wilderness. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Knowles bidding his friends goodbye. From Alone in the Wilderness. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Over the next two months, the activities of the “forest man” became headline news in the Boston Post. Readers learned of his struggle to build a fire, catch trout, and contrive leggings out of moss. On August 24, the Post excitedly titled his dispatch “Knowles Catches Bear in Pit.” The painter turned primitivist furnished readers with a blow-by-blow description of how he caught and killed a young black bear so that he might have its skin as a covering at night and as clothing when he finally reemerged to civilization. Later, he reported how he killed a small deer, grabbing it by its horns and breaking its neck. These exploits were double-edged. On the one hand, they testified to Knowles’s prowess as primordial man, recapitulating the Darwinian struggle by which his ancestors had ascended the ladder of civilization. (“In the wilderness,” he declared, “the one great law is the survival of the fittest.”⁵⁸) On the other hand, these kills violated the Maine game laws, from which Knowles had unsuccessfully sought an exemption. During his last weeks, he grew worried that game wardens might seek him out and arrest him; he spent his last days in the wild fleeing across the Canadian border so that he would not be taken prematurely.

When, scratched, bruised, thirty pounds lighter, and garbed in animal skins, Knowles emerged on October 4 near Megantic, in Quebec, he looked like primordial man come to life. He seemed to have transformed his very race in the process: a reporter described him as “tanned like an Indian, almost black.” The size and enthusiasm of the waiting crowd stunned him. When he came down the steps from his train, he thought the horde “would tear the skins from [his] body.” It was a foretaste of the tremendous receptions to come. All the way through Maine and down to Boston, crowds cheered his passage. Schools released their charges so that they might glimpse the great man. When he arrived in Boston, once again clad in animal skins, crowds mobbed him. For a celebration on Boston, Common, they swelled to an estimated fifteen to twenty thousand people. At Harvard, Dr. Sargent examined Knowles again and pronounced him stronger in every respect than before he entered the woods. Afterward, the staff of Filene’s Men’s Store promised to turn him into a modern man once more through “barbering, manicuring, chiropody and complete outfitting in new and fashionable clothes.”

Knowles in wilderness garb as examined by Dudley A. Sargent,. From Alone in the Wilderness. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Knowles’s metamorphoses from civilized to primitive man and back again seemed to fascinate the public as much as had Houdini’s great magical metamorphoses. At a lavish banquet honoring Knowles, Sargent declared, “A dress shirt is not becoming to him with such a splendid body hidden away underneath.” Yet it was Knowles’s ability to inhabit both worlds that captured the public’s imagination. He served as a primitive proxy for modern men, who liked to imagine that they, too, had splendid bodies hidden underneath their dress shirts. Two months after his return, he completed a book based on his dispatches to the Post called Alone in the Wilderness. A rival newspaper, William Randolph Hearst’s Boston American, charged that Knowles was a fraud who actually bought his celebrated bearskin and slept in a snug, secret cabin while in the woods, but it failed to prick the bubble of his celebrity. Knowles briefly toured on the vaudeville circuit retelling his feat, and his book sold 300,000 copies.⁵⁹

PRIMATE RELATIONS

Burroughs’s “wild child” was of course a fictional hero in an adventure story rather than a historical object of scientific examination. It is doubtful that Burroughs knew of Wild Peter, Victor, or other feral children when he wrote Tarzan. Nor does he appear to have been aware of Ishi or, in the interval between Tarzan’s publication in The All-Story and in book form, to have remarked on the feat of Joseph Knowles. As he later said, the legend of Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf and of Kipling’s animal stories came more to his mind.⁶⁰ In time, Burroughs did learn more about the fate of feral children and acknowledged that Tarzan’s adventures were fictional entertainments, not literal possibilities. He wrote in 1927:

I do not believe that any human infant or child, unprotected by adults of its own species, could survive a fortnight in such an African environment as I describe in the Tarzan stories, and if he did, he would develop into a cunning, cowardly beast, as he would have to spend most of his waking hours fleeing for his life. He would be under-developed from lack of proper and sufficient nourishment, from exposure to the inclemencies of the weather, and from lack of sufficient restful sleep.

Burroughs intended Tarzan as “merely an interesting experiment in the mental laboratory which we call imagination.”⁶¹

Even with this retrospective caveat, Burroughs’s story could be read in two alternative yet overlapping ways. It might be understood, first, as a novel diversion, an experiment in storytelling that aimed only to entertain. At the same time, Tarzan could be read as an allegory that in miniature recounted and explained why its hero (and those like him) triumphed where others failed. In this sense, the workings of the narrative revealed truths about the reader’s world, not just the fictional characters’. Although he denied that the events in his imaginative laboratory could literally happen (which many a reader of Tarzan has contested), Burroughs still permitted a considerable area within which the story might be understood to be true.⁶²

In this imaginative laboratory, Burroughs created a figure whose hereditary advantages, as he conceived them, are severely tested in the harsh environment of the African jungle. At the outset his situation in some ways reverses that of Wild Peter and of Victor. Apes rather than cultured savants regard him as developmentally backward, and both his foster father, Tublat, and the tribal leader, Kerchak, argue that he should be abandoned as hopeless. By the age of ten, he can claim some accomplishments, including superior cunning and ability on the ground, but he remains ashamed of his deficiencies, such as his hairless body, “pinched nose,” and “puny white teeth.”⁶³ The name the apes give him marks his difference (and, ultimately, Burroughs believed, his superiority): Tarzan means white skin.

In this way Burroughs sought to test the nature of white Anglo-Saxon masculinity. A literary fantasy rather than a scientific inquiry, Tarzan nonetheless resonated with the social and natural sciences of the day, which were, of course, much more deeply implicated in Western cultural fantasies than their practitioners realized. What was the nature of the human species, and how was it related to other higher primates? And within the human species, was modern Anglo-Saxon man’s putative superiority intrinsic (biological) or extrinsic (the product of collective social and cultural achievements)? Taken out of their environments, how would modern man fare in the wild and “primitive” man fare in modern civilization? Was primitive man, as exemplified by Ishi, passing with the rise of modern civilization? Or was the racial stock that had created modern man in the first place passing? This last view was exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt’s dire warnings of “race suicide” and Madison Grant’s still more extremist The Passing of the Great Race (1916).⁶⁴ Each view—and at times a combination of both—was widely embraced by European and American scientists at the time. Relations between humans and their fellow primates and between modern and “primitive” man were especially topical when Burroughs was writing.

In many respects, interest in higher primates picked up where interest in feral children left off. (Indeed, both etymologically and biologically, the line between the two frequently blurred.⁶⁵) Especially after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), determining human nature became intimately connected with humanity’s relation to fellow primates and their ongoing struggle for existence. What was distinctively human, it appeared, could be illuminated by determining what was common to members of the primate order. How human beings learned could be clarified by discovering how other primates learned in the wild—and, perhaps, in the laboratory. Comparisons were hampered, however, by the difficulty Western scientists experienced in studying chimpanzees and especially gorillas, which were hard to locate, capture, tame, and maintain in captivity.

A pioneering effort in this regard was made by Richard L. Garner, an early researcher of animal speech who claimed to have observed more chimpanzees and gorillas in their natural state than any other white man. In his desire to forge intellectual and emotional links with these primates—and in his persistent adherence to racial categories—he provides to some degree a flesh-and-blood anticipation of Tarzan. Garner, who was born in Virginia in 1848, declared, “From childhood, I have believed that all kinds of animals have some mode of speech by which they can talk among their own kind, and I have often wondered why man has never tried to learn it.”⁶⁶ Largely on his own, in 1884 he started to study the speech of monkeys and the comparatively few apes (including orangutans, gibbons, gorillas, and chimpanzees) available in American zoological gardens and circuses. He conceived of this task “as very much the same as learning [the speech] of some strange race of mankind—more difficult in the degree of its inferiority, but less in volume.”⁶⁷ In this effort he made the first phonograph recordings of monkeys and played them to other monkeys to observe their reactions. Reasoning that the primates with the greatest physical development would display the greatest linguistic development as well, he set sail in 1892 for what was then French Gabon and French Congo in Equatorial Africa to study chimpanzees and gorillas “in a state of freedom.”⁶⁸

To discover firsthand how chimpanzees and gorillas behaved in the wild, outside human cages, Garner placed himself in a cage. He built a small cubicle, six feet six inches on each side, out of steel mesh, painted it a dingy green, covered it with bamboo leaves, and dubbed it “Fort Gorilla.”⁶⁹ For 112 days in 1893, he made observations from this outpost. He did not prove so inconspicuous as he had hoped, however, and ultimately he had to rely on secondhand reports to augment his researches.

In his account of this expedition, Gorillas and Chimpanzees (1896), Garner stressed the kinship between apes and humans as well as their essential differences. He granted that if one measured an ape’s intelligence along a human scale, its “mental horizon” would resemble a one-year-old child’s. “But,” he continued, with a twist that Burroughs would have appreciated, “if the operation were reversed, and man were placed under the natural conditions of the ape, the comparison would be much less in his favour. There is no common mental unit between them.” Garner cast a skeptical eye on a number of previous reports about the gorilla, especially his belligerent assaults on human beings: “He is shy and timid, and shrinks alike from man and other large animals. I have no doubt that when he is in a rage he is both fierce and powerful, but his ferocity and strength are rated above their true value.”⁷⁰ Nonetheless, with his interest in speech, Garner concentrated on chimpanzees, finding them more sociable, easier to teach, and more manageable. They also had a considerably larger vocabulary than gorillas, he believed, though still “not more than twenty words.” (He could discern only two among gorillas.) He claimed to learn about ten of these words well enough to speak to chimpanzees in their native tongue. He went one step further. Although he emphasized that the true test of an animal’s intelligence is its ability not to learn a human trick but to solve a new problem using its powers of reasoning, he could not resist teaching a chimpanzee to talk.

His pupil in this experiment had been found orphaned in a swamp, and so Garner named him Moses. In a way that recalls Itard’s relation to Victor and Kala’s to Tarzan, Garner became Moses’s tutor and foster father. “I designed to bring Moses up in the way that good chimpanzees ought to be brought up,” he wrote, “so I began to teach him good manners in the hope that some day he would be a shining light to his race, and aid me in my work among them.” One senses Garner’s dry humor here, as well as a hint of the “white man’s burden.” But if a paternalistic twinkle shines through his description of Moses’s tutelage, so does a serious desire to determine to what degree the chimpanzee might be instructed in the refinements of civilization, down to the niceties of table manners. Garner gave Moses “a tin plate and a wooden spoon, but he did not like to use the latter, and seemed to think that it was pure affectation for any one to eat with such an awkward thing,” though Garner kept trying to break Moses of the habit of “putting his fingers in the dish to help himself.” Ultimately, Garner claimed that Moses “was the first of his race that ever spoke a word of human speech,” though in fact the most the animal ever accomplished was to repeat uncomprehendingly two or three chimpanzee sounds that vaguely approximated words known to Garner (none of them English). Garner quickly developed a great affection for Moses and treasured signs of the animal’s devotion to him. If he did not fully succeed in creating an intellectual bond, he certainly established an emotional one.⁷¹

After Moses’s death Garner acquired two other chimpanzees, Aaron, whom he prized and loved, and Elisheba, whom he disliked but tolerated. In his homeward voyage he took both to Liverpool, England, where their response to civilized Western dress surprised him. As he opened their cage in the waiting room at the pier and “they beheld the throng of huge figures with white faces, long skirts and big coats, they were almost frantic with fear. They had never before seen anything like it, and they crouched back in the corner of the cage, clinging to each other and screaming in terror.” “In their own country,” Garner explained, “they had never seen any thing like this, for the natives to whom they were accustomed wear no clothing as a rule, except a small piece of cloth tied round the waist, and the few white men they had seen were mostly dressed in white; but here was a great crowd in skirts and overcoats, and I have no doubt that to them it was a startling sight for the first time.”⁷²

Though in moments such as this Garner was able to see the clothes and bodies of Westerners through new eyes, he was never tempted to “go native” himself. Indeed, in the photographs illustrating his account, his appearance is iconic of the commanding, masculine Western explorer. The image captioned “Starting for a Stroll,” for example, shows him standing in front of his cage with a native boy whose name, unlike those of many of the chimpanzees and some of the gorillas, is never given. The boy is covered from waist to just below the knees by a piece of cloth tied in front. He wears a pendant on his neck and chest. He carries a spear, held in his lowered left hand and his raised right. Garner towers over him. The white man protects himself with a pith helmet, a jacket tightly buttoned at wrist and neck, and trousers tucked into high boots. He holds what appears to be a double-barreled rifle in a fashion roughly symmetrical to the boy’s spear. Together, the two embody the types of “primitive” and “civilized” man in paternalistic colonial relationship, and except for the backdrop, they might as well be the British-American explorer Henry Stanley and his native servant in a similar illustration from the period.

Just as Garner left his native servant unnamed, though the two spent a great deal of time together in and out of the cage, he said little about the native peoples of the areas in which he worked. Nonetheless, his attitudes toward them appear highly conventional (much more so than his scientific researches). Although he sought to qualify a patronizingly hierarchical view of apes, he clearly retained one of Homo sapiens, with white men on top. Indeed, this conviction of white superiority over blacks served as a template as he considered differences among the apes he encountered. Speaking of two distinct types of chimpanzees (the kulu and the ntyigo) that others had considered separate species, for example, he invoked the analogies of race and caste: “I believe them to be two well-defined varieties of the same species; they are the white man and the negro of a common stock. They are the patrician and plebeian of one race, or the nobility and yeomanry of one tribe … . The kulu-kamba is simply a high order of chimpanzees.”⁷³ Garner’s research, like Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, suggests that when white Westerners around the turn of the century thought about their relation to apes, they could not avoid thinking about their relation to their fellowmen or resist reasserting supposedly natural hierarchies in which they stood at the summit. Though Garner was tempted to hang portraits of chimpanzees in his gallery of family relations, metaphorically speaking, he expressed no similar inclination with regard to black Africans.

A comparable attitude may be seen in Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes. The story appeals powerfully to the fantasy of a reunion with the natural world and hence with one’s authentic self. Growing up amid apes in the African jungle, Tarzan achieves a healing of the “bitter bifurcation” of modern Western culture: between civilization and nature, man and animal, mind and body, thought and feeling, idea and act. He exults in the immediate, palpable challenges of the wild, in which “life was never monotonous or stale.” Such an existence prepares him to be an exemplary savage and, ultimately, to become a superb bearer of white Anglo-Saxon civilization. As Burroughs conceived his character, both these capacities were innate, and the jungle environment made them especially robust. Discovering the cabin erected by his father and examining its books as a boy of ten, Tarzan gradually teaches himself to read and to write. In so doing, he recapitulates what Burroughs took to be the process of civilization. The narrator makes sure no reader misses the point:

Squatting upon his haunches on the table top in the cabin his father had built—his smooth, brown, naked little body bent over the book which he rested in his strong slender hands, and his great shock of long, black hair falling about his well shaped head and bright, intelligent eyes—Tarzan of the apes, little primitive man, presented a picture filled, at once, with pathos and with promise—an allegorical figure of the primordial groping through the black night of ignorance toward the light of learning.⁷⁴

Richard Garner and an unidentified African boy “Starting for a Troll.” From Gorillas and Chimpanzees. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Henry Stanley and an African boy. From Stanley’s How I Found Livingston (New York: Scribner’s, 1899). The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

More immediately, Tarzan’s innate capacities allow him to rise above the physically more powerful apes and other animals and to become lord of the jungle. Descended from “the best of a race of mighty fighters,” he delights in battle and the pleasure of the kill. Being from “a race of meat-eaters,” he “craves flesh,” another sign of his vigorous masculinity and racial superiority. Burroughs’s stress on this appetite accords with the view of the physician Woods Hutchinson, who contended that “vegetarianism is the diet of the enslaved, stagnant, and conquered races, and a diet rich in meat is that of the progressive, the dominant, and the conquering strains.” Tarzan enthusiastically devours raw gorilla and lion meat; and when he first sees a black native cook a boar, he cannot imagine “ruin[ing] good meat in any such foolish manner.” Tarzan proves a mighty hunter through his innate intelligence and facility with rope and knife and, later, bow and arrow. His easy mastery of the noose to trap his enemies recalls Burroughs’s own experience in the West as well as those described in novels such as The Virginian and The Clansman. With such weapons, Tarzan triumphs over rivals within the colony and the colony’s most feared enemies: other apes, a lion, and his fellowmen.⁷⁵

TARZAN AND THE REDISCOVERY OF WHITE MALE IDENTITY

The degree to which they are his fellowmen and the obligations of such fellowship become the great driving questions of the novel. Like Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask and similar melodramas of a captive denied the knowledge of his noble birth, this is essentially a story of Tarzan’s unfolding realization of his identity as a white Anglo-Saxon and, more specifically, as the rightful Lord Greystoke. The reader is in on the secret from the beginning, of course, but as Burroughs develops his plot, Tarzan must discover the nature of his “own kind” and the truth of his noble ancestry. He answers the first of these questions largely intuitively, though his uncertainty whether he is truly a man or the son of Kala and perhaps “a strange white ape” adds a titillation not completely dispelled until the book’s final pages.⁷⁶

Growing up in a Darwinian Eden, glorying in the struggle for existence, Tarzan nibbles on the apple that will provide the knowledge of his humanity in his father’s cabin. First from an illustrated primer, then from other books, he sees pictures of white boys and men and gradually realizes why he is different from the apes around him. Like Adam, with this knowledge he becomes aware of his nakedness; yet he feels no shame. He proudly displays his “sleek skin” and covets clothing only as an ungainly emblem of human superiority over other animals.⁷⁷

From Tarzan’s first sight of another live human being, however, his sense of commonality is checked by visceral racial antipathy. A remnant of a once powerful tribe moves into the area, fleeing the brutal oppression wrought by King Leopold II of Belgium. Burroughs’s initial description of the black warriors anticipates Tarzan’s response:

On their backs were oval shields, in their noses huge rings, while from the kinky wool of their heads protruded tufts of gay feathers.

Across their foreheads were tattooed three parallel lines of color, and on each breast three concentric circles. Their yellow teeth were filed to sharp points, and their great protruding lips added still further to the low and bestial brutishness of their appearance.

Almost immediately, Kulonga, their chief’s son, slays Tarzan’s foster mother, Kala. Without knowing the nature of Kala’s killer, Tarzan determines to avenge her death. Kulonga is the first human he has encountered since infancy; still, when Tarzan sees him, he immediately identifies him from his father’s books as “the negro,” “so like him in form and yet so different in face and color.” He tracks the black warrior to the edge of his village, then throws a “quick noose” over his head and, acting as a one-man vigilante party, lynches him:

Hand over hand Tarzan drew the struggling black until he had him hanging by his neck in midair; then Tarzan climbed to a larger branch drawing the still threshing victim well up into the sheltering verdure of the tree.

Here he fastened the rope securely to a stout branch, and then descending, plunged his hunting knife into Kulonga’s heart. Kala was avenged.⁷⁸

Whatever Burroughs’s intentions were in this graphic description (reiterated when Tarzan kills other natives), it recalls in especially disturbing ways the racial lynchings that raged across the South from the 1880s through the 1920s.

Tarzan strips the dead body of possessions. Then, following apes’ custom in dealing with slain enemies from outside their tribe, he prepares to eat the corpse. At this crucial moment, however, a minimal sense of shared humanity, fortified by ancestral instinct, overcomes both the chasm of race and the training of apes. For Burroughs, this instinct is by no means universal; rather, it flows from Tarzan’s Anglo-Saxon blood. Kulonga’s people have no such inhibitions, readers soon learn: to torture and devour their enemies are their greatest delights. Spying on their cannibal revels from a perch high in a tree, Tarzan “saw that these people were more wicked than his own apes” and “began to hold his own kind in but low esteem.” Except for his admiration of their body ornaments, Tarzan’s view of black Africans seems little different from the views of most whites of his day: he is repulsed by their cruelty, contemptuous of their superstitions, and happy to terrorize them for his amusement and to steal from them whatever he wants. In The Descent of Man (a book in Burroughs’s library), Darwin consoled his readers with the thought that mankind’s fellow primates were in many respects ancestors as noble as present-day savages: “For my own part, I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, … as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.” These natives may be of a common species, but they are not truly Tarzan’s kind at all.⁷⁹

Still, Tarzan is a climber both of trees and of the evolutionary and social ladder. Shortly after he kills Kulonga and sends a wave of fright into the native village, he stabs the great ape-king Kerchak in a fierce fight and assumes command of the colony. Although he rules wisely, ape administration proves dull work. Even the excitement of defeating a challenger such as his stepbrother Terkoz cannot curb his restlessness. He abdicates his throne to search for “other white men like himself.”⁸⁰

Coincidentally, another mutiny is brewing nearby, remarkably similar to the one that cast Tarzan’s parents onshore twenty years earlier. In their swarthy, bestial appearance, the mutineers are virtual copies of the earlier crew, except that this time the giant stand-in for Black Michael is immediately shot by a rat-faced little villain named Snipes. To Tarzan these men seem “no different from the black men” in their lack of civilization, and he feels no kinship toward them.⁸¹

The five hapless passengers, however, form a different category. Tarzan finds ample reason to consider them stupid and ridiculous, although to a great extent these are faults of overcivilization. The most absurd of the lot is Archimedes Q. Porter, an elderly, pedantic professor who wears a frock coat and silk hat even in the African jungle and constantly loses both his train of thought and his way. His assistant, the fussy Samuel T. Philander, is scarcely more practical. The professor’s daughter, however, provides the novel’s love interest and Tarzan’s reason for caring about them. She is Jane Porter, a beautiful, golden-haired, snowy-white Southern belle almost exactly Tarzan’s age. Her immense black mammy, a minstrel caricature named Esmeralda who spouts malaprop nonsense and faints in every crisis, accompanies her. Fifth, and last, wearing white ducks as if plucked from a lawn-tennis match, is Jane’s English suitor, the tall, handsome, and proper William Cecil Clayton, who just happens to be the son of the current Lord Greystoke and so is Tarzan’s first cousin.

The cover of the October 1912 issue of The All-Story, featuring Tarzan of the Apes: A Romance of the Jungle. Illustration by Clinton Pettee. Edgar Rice Burronghs Memorial Collection. University of Louisville

At last, then, Tarzan discovers his own kind, the race, class, and even kin from which he springs, though he does not learn the secret of his birth until virtually the last page. Even so, differences divide them: not only differences of language (Tarzan can read and write in English but knows only animal speech) but, more important, immense differences between Tarzan’s brute training and modern Anglo-American civilization. That this contrast works overwhelmingly to Tarzan’s advantage constitutes the great twist and appeal of Burroughs’s story. Faced with the basic challenges of survival in the wild, the passengers’ education proves worthless. The jungle that is an open book to Tarzan is to them an unknown and frightening hieroglyph. Most especially, due to the fateful combination of his innate attributes and his savage upbringing, Tarzan possesses virile virtues to a peerless degree. None can match him in physical prowess, sensory keenness, quick thinking, courage, or selflessness. The difference between Tarzan and his cousin measures the exact degree to which he has been shaped by the jungle. The two have virtually the same heredity but completely different training. Whereas Clayton has become pampered and privileged, Tarzan is the ultimate self-taught, self-made man. In ordinary company Clayton would stand out, but next to this paragon of primal masculinity he is utterly eclipsed.

Indeed, for the rest of the book, Tarzan’s chief occupation is to rescue these characters from one near disaster after another. Their assignment, in turn, is to admire his beautiful and powerful body while he does so. Burroughs has already held that body up for his readers’ admiration many times, insisting that here at last is truly the perfect man, a Sandovian combination of Hercules and Adonis: “His straight and perfect figure, muscled as the best of the ancient Roman gladiators must have been muscled, and yet with the soft and sinuous curves of a Greek god, told at a glance the wondrous combination of enormous strength with suppleness and speed.” In lieu of wearing a fig leaf, Tarzan has donned a doeskin breechcloth (stripped from another black native he has killed) and meets members of the Porter party with minimally decent attire. He drops in on Cecil Clayton first, to save him from an attacking lion. A “naked giant,” “the embodiment of physical perfection,” he leaps from a tree directly onto the lion’s back. Through Clayton’s eyes, Burroughs’s description continues: “With lightning speed an arm that was banded layers of iron muscle encircled the huge neck, and the great beast was raised from behind, roaring and pawing the air—raised as easily as Clayton would have lifted a pet dog.” Not surprisingly, the All-Story illustrator Clinton Pettee chose this scene for the cover of the Tarzan issue.⁸²

At this point Burroughs starts releasing lions as rapidly as a dispatcher does taxis in a thunderstorm. Back at Tarzan’s cabin, another lion (originally a tiger in the All-Story version) is crawling through the window to devour Jane Porter and the hysterical Esmeralda. With Clayton in tow, Tarzan races back, pulls the beast out the window by the tail, and gets it in a full nelson. Clayton stands ineffectually to the side, as if taking notes: “At last Clayton saw the immense muscles of Tarzan’s shoulders and biceps leap into corded knots beneath the silver moonlight. There was a long sustained and supreme effort on the ape-man’s part—and the vertebrae of Sabor’s neck parted with a sharp snap.” Such a feat calls for a little celebration, and, as is his custom, Tarzan sounds “the bull ape’s savage roar of victory,” the African analogue to Buck’s call of the wild. Then, leaving everyone within earshot quivering with fright from his yell, he is off to rescue Professor Porter and his assistant from yet another lion.⁸³

The first time Jane sees Tarzan for herself, however, he is saving her from a more titillating and fearful menace. Tarzan’s old rival Terkoz has been driven out of the ape colony, only to discover Jane and Esmeralda in the jungle. The “horrible man-like beast” carries Jane off, intending her for the first of his new harem, “a fate a thousand times worse than death.” Here, within the conventions of melodrama, Burroughs transformed fears of the predatory black rapist and the specter of miscegenation into fears of hybridity between human beings and apes. Although nineteenth-century European naturalists stressed the “law” of nature by which animals refused to mate with those not of their kind, a fascination with exceptions persisted. In 1865 the British Anthropological Society republished a summary of travelers’ reports that described “lascivious male apes attack[ing] women,” who “perish miserably in the brutal embraces of their ravishers.” ⁸⁴ Other popular accounts, such as Paul Du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861), reported similar legends, if only to debunk them.⁸⁵ (As with miscegenation, there was a double standard at work in these fears; the thought that Tarzan’s mother might be an ape was apparently far less dreadful than the idea of his having been fathered by an ape and a white woman.) In Burroughs’s story, of course, Tarzan intercepts the abductor in the nick of time, and the two square off for a duel to the death. Burroughs charges the violent scene with eroticism. Jane breathlessly watches the struggle, “her lithe, young form flattened against the trunk of a great tree, her hands tight pressed against her rising and falling bosom, and her eyes wide with mingled horror, fascination, fear, and admiration.” The sight of Tarzan’s body, locked in mortal combat with the monstrous ape, proves irresistible:

As the great muscles of the man’s back and shoulders knotted beneath the tension of his efforts, and the huge biceps and forearm held at bay those mighty tusks, the veil of centuries of civilization and culture was swept from the blurred vision of the Baltimore girl.

When the long knife drank deep a dozen times of Terkoz’ heart’s blood, and the great carcass rolled lifeless upon the ground, it was a primeval woman who sprang forward with outstretched arms toward the primeval man who had fought for her and won her.⁸⁶

Where will this romance between wild man and professor’s daughter end? That is the question for the rest of the novel. In reality, wild boys and men rarely if ever brimmed with sexual passion and allure. Both Wild Peter’s and Victor’s examiners noted their indifference to women; and Ishi, who had very little sexual experience, “blushed furiously” whenever the subject of sex cropped up. Yet Tarzan, Burroughs assured his readers, is a “red-blooded man”; so, with Jane, he experiences a conflict between his savage training and his innate nobility comparable to his deliberation over whether to dine on Kulonga: “The order of the jungle [was] for the male to take his mate by force; but could Tarzan be guided by the laws of the beasts?” Only after wringing every delicious drop of suspense from the situation does Burroughs conclude, No. With inborn courtliness, Tarzan protects Jane and returns her to her father and friends unharmed.⁸⁷

Jane’s response is more conflicted and confused. After she first throws herself into his arms, her “outraged conscience” compels her to repulse him. When, nonetheless, Tarzan carries her off into the forest, she feels blissfully secure in the arms of her “forest god.” She has fallen deeply in love. Cecil Clayton feels the shift in her affections and jealously taunts her that Tarzan is “some half-demented castaway,” “beast of the jungle,” or savage cannibal. These are in fact her own fears as well. When she tries to imagine Tarzan with her in civilized society—eating like an animal on an ocean liner, acting like an uncouth illiterate in front of her friends—she shudders with disgust. Can a girl from a genteel Baltimore family truly find happiness with “this jungle waif”? Still, he appeals to “the primeval woman in her nature,” and she longs to be possessed by him; if need be, she will plunge into the jungle with him forever.⁸⁸

It is not necessary to follow all the twists and turns of Burroughs’s plot to the story’s end. Suffice it to say that Tarzan determines to win Jane any way he can, even if it means becoming civilized. Thus he accomplishes one more astonishing metamorphosis: from savage noble to suave socialite. As yet he cannot speak English, though he can read and write it fluently. In a matter of weeks, a French navy lieutenant, Paul D‘Arnot (whose life he also saves), coaches him (as Itard did Victor and Garner did Moses) with dazzling success. Tarzan quickly acquires the French language and manners (though, like Garner’s Moses, he longs at times to throw his cutlery aside and to attack his food with hands and teeth). D’Arnot also teaches him not to kill every black man he meets as the two make their way to an African port. Now “Monsieur Tarzan,” he dons shirt and trousers, although he is happy to shed them on a bet and, naked, to slay a lion. Swinging through the trees once more, he strongly feels the call of the wild and, even more intensely, the constrictions of civilization: “This was life! Ah! how he loved it! … At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been.”⁸⁹ What holds him for the moment to civilization is the hope of marrying Jane. Finally, in a dizzying rush of events, he digs up the buried treasure that Professor Porter has sought, follows Jane to America, and rescues her from a Wisconsin forest fire, swinging through the trees as of old.

But problems remain. To satisfy her father’s financial obligation, Jane has reluctantly agreed to marry a scheming businessman twice her age. Still, Tarzan, who has fought Terkoz for Jane, is not about to lose her to this polished villain. “I am still a wild beast at heart,” he reminds her. Gripping his rival by the throat, he persuades him to release Jane from her promise. Yet no sooner is his back turned than Jane pledges herself to his cousin Cecil Clayton, the safe, “civilized” choice. What’s a jungle lord to do? The noble thing, of course. He forbears showing Clayton the proof he has just obtained that he is indeed the rightful Lord Greystoke. When Clayton naively asks him how he came to be in the African jungle in the first place, Tarzan replies, “I was born there … . My mother was an Ape, and of course she couldn’t tell me much about it. I never knew who my father was.” And it’s back to the jungle once more.⁹⁰

The selfless renunciation at the story’s end provided the final hook for many readers. Knowing that they would “read for the ending,” Burroughs deliberately withheld the anticipated romantic union of Tarzan and Jane. Letters poured into The All-Story demanding a sequel. Yet, as an American soldier in Panama wrote to the editor on behalf of “hundreds” in his unit, some regretted that Tarzan “lost the girl—while others wonder if he can get used to living in ‘civilization.’”⁹¹

They were right to wonder. Burroughs intended Tarzan of the Apes as a romantic adventure story, not as a formal meditation on civilization and its discontents. Nevertheless, his tale gave powerful narrative force to a widespread sense that modern technological civilization created restrictions, frustrations, ordinariness that entailed special losses for men. Like Wister and London, Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner in his own time, and like earlier American writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville, Burroughs celebrated untamed masculine individualism. More particularly, he created in Tarzan a figure who embodied the enduring impulse, in Emerson’s words, to “enjoy an original relation to the universe,” to raw nature, with all its primal, anarchic force. The desire for unmediated contact with nature and occasions to test oneself against it constitutes an overriding element of American masculine identity. It is hardly surprising that in the early twentieth century, when an increasingly impersonal, bureaucratic, and corporate society dominated the everyday life of individual citizens, that desire flared with new brightness and heat.⁹²

What is more problematic in Burroughs’s story and in the works of many of his contemporaries is that this assertion of masculine wildness is often explicitly tied to whiteness. Earlier writers were hardly free from bigotry, but to a notable extent writers such as Emerson and Thoreau at least tried to put their affirmations of individual wildness in the service of democratic inclusiveness and against systems of oppression, of which slavery was the most glaring and hateful.⁹³ In Burroughs’s Tarzan as in Wister’s The Virginian, however, all men are not created equal. True, Tarzan does not depend on outward hereditary privilege; indeed, the book ends with his refusing to claim his title and estate. As a self-made man, he could appeal to many readers. Yet Burroughs, in line with the predominant thought of influential whites of his time, believed that Tarzan carries his most valuable hereditary privilege, his innate superiority, in his very blood. He could be strengthened rather than degraded by the wild precisely because he holds the best of Western civilization within him. Others less favored by heredity, such as the African natives and atavistic crew members, in Burroughs’s eyes do not.

If for Burroughs and his readers wildness enhanced white Anglo-Saxons but debased black Africans, it also enhanced masculinity—but not, in the same way, femininity. Tarzan’s murmured statement to Jane in the story’s concluding pages, “I am still a wild beast at heart,” is as much a reassurance as a warning. His wildness is the basis of his virility, power, and authority, and for him to become truly civilized, to lock himself within the “iron cage” of modern capitalist society, would be tantamount to emasculation. With Jane it is another story. Burroughs allows her to submit to her awakened primal passions only in fleeting and fantastic moments. Perhaps he sensed that to make her as wild as Tarzan would be to replace her teasing oscillation between submission and resistance with an independent sexuality less acceptable to his readers and, perhaps, to himself. The metamorphosis that accompanied moving between civilization and the wild remained, above all, a masculine performance. Just as Houdini’s substitute trunk trick ended with him free and Bess locked inside, the drama of Tarzan’s escape art shines most brilliantly if Jane remains locked within the conventions of civilization and is released only on his initiative. It is lucky for him, then, that she plays it safe and chooses Clayton. To continue as Burroughs’s “perfect man” at the top of the natural hierarchy, Tarzan must be free and unencumbered, alone and in the wild.

The gender issues of wildness may be further illuminated by considering Tarzan in relation to a novel published three years later, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. Even though we have no evidence that Gilman, the most prominent feminist theorist of this period, ever read Tarzan, we may regard her novel as a kind of rejoinder to it. Though a socialist as well as a feminist, Gilman had much in common with Burroughs in her views on race. Indeed, she pursued far more seriously than he did the subjects of primitivism, evolution, eugenics, and the superiority of white Anglo-Saxon civilization. She differed markedly, however, in one respect: she was convinced that the sharp division between the sexes and women’s dependence on men—far from being hallmarks of advanced civilization—were perversions that led to social and racial decadence.⁹⁴ Undoubtedly, she would have distrusted Burroughs’s hypermasculine ideal of Tarzan, believing as she did that primitive man behaved more like the rapist Terkoz than like the chivalrous “forest god.” Certainly, too, she would have seized on the character of Jane Porter as a damning example of an overly delicate woman, economically, socially, and psychologically dependent on men. Gilman presented her startling ideas in Women and Economics (1898), The Man-Made World (1911), and many other writings. Then in Herland, a story serialized in Gilman’s self-authored monthly The Forerunner in 1915, she set forth her own fictional geography of feminism, a utopian view that stands as a retort to the works of Wister, London, and Burroughs.

Gilman’s story begins as another tale about white males exploring an exotic and uncharted territory. Three young American bachelors on a scientific expedition learn from neighboring “savages” of an isolated mountain country where “no men lived—only women and girl children.”⁹⁵ Equipped with a private yacht, motorboat, and biplane, they set out to discover Herland for themselves. Although close friends and former classmates, the three differ in both their training and their attitudes toward women. Jeff Margrave, a physician, is a dewy-eyed idealist who longs to place women on a pedestal and worship at their feet. Terry Nicholson, a rich explorer who finances the excursion, prefers to seduce and dominate women. In a country of women, he jokes, he will be crowned king in no time. The narrator of the story, Vandyck Jennings, tries to steer a middle course. A sociologist, he sees himself as an open-minded investigator, although he enters Herland doubting the very possibility of women’s independence.

What the three discover confounds their expectations—and challenges the very notion of savage virility on which Tarzan was based. Far from a primitive wilderness, the entire land appears to them “an enormous garden,” perfectly cultivated, immaculately ordered, utterly devoid of wild beasts—or wildness of any kind. The population is equally well tended. Two thousand years earlier, after the country was sealed off by a volcanic eruption, its men died out, but through a miraculous mutation, women developed the capacity for virgin birth, producing only girls. Gradually they created a eugenic utopia, limiting the population and choosing mothers of the finest Aryan stock so as to avoid the “degenerate” and “unfit” and to breed out “the lowest types.” The result is a “clean-bred, vigorous lot,” a race as remarkable for its intelligence as for its health, strength, and beauty. There has not been a criminal for six hundred years. With only one sex, there is no sense of what is “manly” and what “womanly,” a situation that unnerves the male visitors. With no predatory beasts to slay, no savages to kill, no villains to foil, no helpless women to rescue or even assist, no struggle of any kind, there is no opportunity to display white masculine prowess. As Terry complains: “I like Something Doing. Here it’s all done.”⁹⁶

The contrast between Tarzan and Herland emerges most vividly in the stories’ attempted rapes. The dark, hairy ape Terkoz provides an occasion for Tarzan to display the courage, strength, chivalry, and sexual self-restraint that supposedly distinguished the finest Anglo-Saxons from the darker races and beasts. In Gilman’s story, the situation is quite different. The arrival of the three men gives Herland the opportunity to reestablish its ancient bisexual order and to rejoin with other lands. By permitting the three men to marry local women and to conceive children, the nation also hopes to enlarge its ethic of Motherhood to include a new Fatherhood and Brotherhood as well. The men eagerly assent, but, once wed, they discover that Herland’s idea of marriage is very different from theirs. Their wives still live apart, and they limit sexual relations to the minimum for procreation. Van and Jeff gradually adjust to the new order, but Terry cannot. He believes that a woman wishes to be mastered, and, like a hunter, he approaches her as “some quarry he was pursuing, something to catch and conquer.” However, his wife, Alima, even if she has an “atavistic” element of femininity, is no swooning, delicate “girl” but “a big, handsome creature, rather exceptionally strong even in that race of strong women.” In a desperate effort to reassert his mastery and what he regards as his conjugal rights, Terry tries to rape her. Alima fights back, kicking him in the groin. Two or three women aid her in repulsing his attack. They easily force him to the floor, tie him “hand and foot, and then, in sheer pity for his futile rage, …anesthetize him.”⁹⁷ Here is a metamorphosis indeed, in which man is tied up and rendered unconscious like a captured animal (or as in a Houdini nightmare) and women are free and in power. Alima initially wants Terry killed—Terkoz’s fate—but the court banishes him instead. Though Herland apparently continues with its “Great Change” to heterosexuality, some readers may have wondered why.

THE TARZAN MACHINE

Herland reached only loyal readers of Gilman’s slender magazine in 1915. By that time, through Burroughs’s unflagging efforts, Tarzan had already found millions of fans. His success developed from the bottom up, beginning with magazine and newspaper readers and rising like an irresistible tide to the book-buying public. After the tale appeared in its entirety in the October 1912 issue of The All-Story, which had a circulation of perhaps 200,000, Burroughs approached several publishers, including A. C. McClurg, Bobbs-Merrill, Reilly & Britton, and Dodd, Mead, seeking a book contract. All turned him down flat. However, the Munsey Company, publishers of The All-Story, arranged with the New York Evening World for Tarzan to be serialized in that and other newspapers across the country. Tarzan thus reached an enormous readership, including members of the working class, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. Its hero became a cultural icon before the story ever appeared in book form and for readers who would never enter a bookshop.

The title page of the first edition of Tarzan of the Apes (1914), adapted from a drawing by Fred J. Arting. Edgar Rice Burroughs Memorial Collection, University of Louisville

Elmo Lincoln, the first film

Tarzan. Edgar Rice Burroughs Memorial Collection, University of

Louisville

Though Burroughs was of mixed minds about attempting a sequel, at the urging of The All-Story’s editor Thomas Metcalf, he completed The Return of Tarzan in January 1913. Here the formerly laconic jungle lord, having tasted civilization, moralizes freely about its effeminacy and corruption as he foils dastardly villains on several continents, escapes from a tomb in a manner reminiscent of Houdini, and, once again, rescues a marooned Jane Porter on the African coast. Giving readers the satisfaction he had withheld in the first Tarzan novel, Burroughs contrived to marry Tarzan and Jane in the tale’s closing lines. But inevitable as were Tarzan’s triumphs within his fictional realm, he still encountered formidable challenges within the harsh world of publishing. The enthusiastic Metcalf, who had trumpeted the original Tarzan story to readers (“Zowie! but things happen!”) and elaborately whetted their appetites for a sequel, rejected Burroughs’s tale outright. It suffered from “lack of balance,” he explained cryptically, a charge particularly unsettling for Burroughs, who worried how far to let his imagination carry him. “A well balanced mind would not turn out my kind of stuff,” he replied defensively. But a rival pulp magazine, New Story, snapped up Burroughs’s sequel with the rapacity of a crocodile and paid him one thousand dollars, far more than he had expected from The All-Story.⁹⁸

With this crowning success, Burroughs finally quit his job at System to work in the “fiction factory” full-time and to become a veritable Tarzan machine. Early the next year he dashed off The Beasts of Tarzan in just over a month and sold it to The All-Story for twenty-five hundred dollars, the most the magazine had ever paid for a story. Then at last he found a book publisher for the original Tarzan of the Apes, McClurg and Company, which repented its earlier decision. The novel appeared in June 1914, illustrated by Fred J. Arting, who depicted Tarzan in silhouette with a Plains Indian profile and a posture both languid and alert. Tarzan still had to struggle for readers. The print run of the first edition was ten thousand copies. Although the novel never topped the sales charts in any one year, it achieved remarkable success over time both in the United States and abroad with sales that swelled into the millions before Burroughs’s death.⁹⁹

A succession of film versions powered the Tarzan machine, beginning with the release of the first Tarzan of the Apes in January 1918. With a coordinated publicity campaign of film distribution, newspaper serialization, and book sales, the movie proved one of the most profitable in the history of the nascent industry, and sales of Burroughs’s Tarzan books soared. The film’s star, barrel-chested Elmo Lincoln, attempted to embody the Arting illustration with the help of a wig. Reviewers generally applauded his efforts, though Burroughs thought he looked more like a “prize bear.”¹⁰⁰

For a quarter century, from 1914 to 1939, Burroughs turned out a new Tarzan book virtually every year. In failing health, he produced his last in 1947, three years before his death. During his lifetime, he also published eleven Martian adventures, four stories set on Venus, six “Pellucidar” tales taking place within Earth, several Westerns, and numerous other works. “I want to be known as Edgar Rice Burroughs the author, not Edgar Rice Burroughs the author of Tarzan,” he declared, but he never truly got his wish. Instead, for all his success, he found himself a captive of his fictional creation. Ironically, in committing himself to manufacture a never-ending series of adventures celebrating masculine wildness and freedom, he discovered that he had exchanged one punishing regimen for another, albeit much more profitable, one. As early as December 1919, he was complaining, “I feel now that I can never write another Tarzan story and I … do not see how the reading public can stand for any more of them … . I have said and re-said a dozen times everything that there is to say about Tarzan—this is why the work is so hard.” Similar moans accompanied the writing of later Tarzan adventures. Twenty years after the initial appearance of Tarzan of the Apes, at the height of his success, he wrote, “The only thing about the marketing of my stories that ever surprises me is when they sell. I have never written a story yet but that deep down in my heart I was positive that it would be refused.”¹⁰¹ Though he commanded his literary empire with stern authority and claimed a “big” man’s income, he never escaped the self-doubt and tedium of the walled-in clerk.