Jungle Tales of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

My Ballantine paperback copies of Jungle Tales of Tarzan (I have a Richard Powers one and a Neal Adams one) try to pass off the book as a novel, but, in fact, its twelve chapters are all short stories that appeared in the magazine Blue Book in 1916 and 1917.  (To see the covers of the issues of Blue Book in which these twelve tales made their debuts, follow this link to ERBzine; the cover illustrations don't show Lord Greystoke or jungle beasts or anything like that, but ladies in what you might call the Charles Gibson/Harrison Fisher mold.)

The stories in Jungle Tales of Tarzan take place in Tarzan's youth, before he has met any white people; wikipedia tells us that Tarzan aficionado extraordinaire Philip José Farmer calculates that most or all of the stories in the book are set in 1907 and 1908.  A running theme of the stories is Tarzan's need for companionship and his developing relationships with the other inhabitants of the jungle.  In the first chapter, "Tarzan's First Love," Tarzan reaches puberty and falls in love with Teeka, the prettiest female ape, and is jealous over her relationship with Taug, one of the bigger and tougher apes with whom Tarzan has grown up.  When members of a local black tribe, a bunch of cannibals lead by chief Mbonga who relatively recently moved to the area, in flight from the tyranny and oppression of the Belgians, captures Taug, Tarzan is at first happy to see his rival disposed of.  But then realizes that he is not truly compatible with Teeka or any of his hairy compatriots, and decides to rescue Taug.  Later, in "The Fight for the Balu," Tarzan is fascinated by Taug and Teeka's baby, and has a chance to rescue the little tyke from a great cat; Tarzan also rescues Teeka from a rogue male ape from another tribe in "The Battle for Teeka."  Taug becomes Tarzan's best friend in his tribe and a powerful advocate and ally.

In "The Lion" Tarzan is saved by his little friend Manu, the monkey.  In "The Capture of Tarzan," we learn about the developing friendship of our hero with Tantor the elephant; Tarzan saves the pachyderm from a trap set for him by hunters of Mbonga's tribe, and when those hunters capture Tarzan instead and are all set to sacrifice him, the elephant comes to his rescue.

Mbonga's tribe plays a role in many of the stories in Jungle Tales of Tarzan, the native Africans acting as a foil for white Englishman Tarzan (Burroughs suggests that stereotypical English traits like "a love of fair play" and "orderliness" have been passed to Tarzan via heredity) and as an opportunity for Tarzan to demonstrate his maturation.  (As in so much fiction in English, black people are present in the narrative to show us how good or how bad the white characters are.)  Throughout most of the book, Tarzan, who hates the blacks because they slew his adoptive ape mother (whom he still thinks his true mother), and who anyway thinks of himself and the African tribesmen as jungle beasts (though Tarzan tends to think of himself as the greatest of the beasts), without a second thought kills Mbonga's people when he runs into them, to help his animal friends or because he wants to steal from them or just for sport.  Tarzan is a practical joker who, when he finds the tribesmen have baited a trap for a lion with a goat, will free the goat (and kill it and eat it raw) and then capture one of Mbonga's people and put him in the trap in the goat's place so the lion will kill the man and his comrades will find their comrade's mauled body when they come to check the trap the next day.

Over the course of the book, Tarzan's feelings about the members of Mbonga's tribe and his behavior towards them evolves to a certain extent.  Tarzan so enjoys playing with Taug and Teeka's baby, so envies the bond he sees between parents and children, that in "Tarzan and the Black Boy" he tries to acquire a child of his own--by abducting Tibo, a ten-year-old boy of Mbonga's tribe.  Burroughs pulls no punches when showing how bad an idea this is--the poor kid is constantly crying because he misses his mother and out of fear--among other terrors Tarzan subjects him to, the apes who are Tarzan's adoptive tribe try to kill Tibo.  Because he refuses to eat bugs and other creepy things that Tarzan and the apes eat regularly, Tibo becomes horribly emaciated.  Eventually good luck lands the boy back with his mother, Momaya.

"Tarzan and the Black Boy" is one of the more straightforwardly racist portions of Tarzan saga I have read so far; you can of course argue that the whole idea of Tarzan is racist (an English aristocrat goes to Africa and proves he's better than Africans at everything on their home turf, even without the benefit of firearms and the other apparatus of modern industrial Britain), but in "Tarzan and the Black Boy" Burroughs just comes right out and says that blacks are inferior to whites in addition to showing it.  Burroughs also describes at length Momaya's body modifications, like the wooden skewer through her nose, her filed teeth, her tattoos, and some kind of metal ornament that pulls down her lower lip and perpetually exposes her lower teeth.  Burroughs assures us that her fellow blacks find her beautiful, but to us readers she would be hideous.  Tibo, we are told is "handsome"..."for a black."  Ouch.  Burroughs also tells us that "the spirit of barter is strong in the breasts of the blacks;" I don't know that I have heard this stereotype before--in fact, I have heard that black people, or maybe just African-Americans, are reluctant to haggle.

Despite all the condescending, belittling and prejudiced things Burroughs has to say about black people, he makes the kidnapped boy and his bereaved mother, the victims of Tarzan's selfish misbehavior, sympathetic and even admirable characters.  In keeping with his theme of a parent's love for her children, Burroughs describes how Momaya risks many dangers in her efforts to get her son back.  One of these dangers is consulting a hermit witch doctor said to be more powerful than the witch doctor of Mbonga's tribe.  This witch doctor, named Bukawai, is an effective villain, a highlight of Jungle Tales of Tarzan.  Bukawai has as companions two hyenas, and suffers from a disease, I guess leprosy, that has lead to much of his face falling off.  Gross!  The adventure of Bukawai that begins in "Tarzan and the Black Boy" continues in "The Witch-Doctor Seeks Vengeance" and "The End of Bukawai."  Momaya gets her son back by luck, before Bukawai has cast his spell and before he has been paid his fee by Momaya, and he feels cheated, so he kidnaps Tibo and ransoms him; eventually Tarzan rescues Tibo and metes out a terrible justice to the witch-doctor.

The least interesting and entertaining chapter of Jungle Tales of Tarzan is
"The Nightmare," in which Tarzan dreams of being carried off by a 
huge bird; for some reason both J. Allen St. John and Richard Powers thought
that chapter most appropriate for illustration

In "The God of Tarzan," Lord Greystoke begins to learn empathy and mercy, staying his hand when he has Mbonga himself at his mercy.  In the final chapter of the book, Tarzan encounters a black man whose courage he admires, and he dissuades the apes of his tribe from slaying him.  

I haven't mentioned it before, because I know these blog posts are already too long, but in the last two Tarzan novels I read, The Son of Tarzan and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, Burroughs talks about religion in a way that is interesting, and this is still more the case here in Jungle Tales of Tarzan.  In those novels, Burroughs, as narrator, as well as Tarzan the character, voiced conventional ideas about religion, like that God created the world and that the bad will be punished in the afterlife, though perhaps God may show mercy on those who have misbehaved here on Earth.  Here in the Jungle Tales, Burroughs continues to endorse conventional views of God.  Tarzan, studying the books found in his dead parent's cabin, comes to wonder about God, and comes to believe that it is God who has created all the good things in the jungle, the flowers and trees and so forth, and that it is God who gives people the inclination and the courage to do the right thing, like protecting a baby or showing mercy to a helpless enemy when it might be safer or more profitable to do the wrong thing.  Burroughs does however end his chapter on Tarzan's search for God on a somewhat discordant note, as the ape-man wonders who created the vile and disgusting snake.     

While accepting the idea of a divine creator, Burroughs does appear in the Jungle Tales to attack organized religion, and not just among weirdos like those in Opar and primitives like Mbonga's cannibals.  The witch doctors in the book are selfish scammers, their religion a way of exploiting their fellows, and Mbonga is in cahoots with his tribe's priest, who shares with him a cut of the wealth  extracted from the credulous commoners.  In "Tarzan and the Black Boy," Burroughs jocularly calls this corrupt relationship between witch doctor and chief  "the age-old alliance that exists between church and state," suggesting his portrayal of African cannibals whose teeth are filed is, in part, a satire of Western elites.

Burroughs has a smooth, comfortable writing style, and this book is very readable and quite entertaining.  The stories are not just an endless series of scenes in which a naked dude kills animals and people in hand-to-hand combat; while, yeah, we do get plenty of that, Burroughs also really tries to get into the heads, to depict the psychologies, of the inhabitants of his fantasy version of early-twentieth century Africa, and he succeeds in making all these characters compelling.  I've mentioned a bunch of interesting figures already, and I'll point out one last memorable minor character: a monkey who likes to watch gory fights and so tries to get apes to fight each other.

When I wrote about Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, I said it was hard to identify with paragons like Tarzan and his wife Jane, and so I identified more with the villains, La of Opar and the renegade Belgian officer Werper, people who were driven by ordinary emotions like loneliness, lust, greed and fear, and who committed all kinds of blunders and misdeeds.  One of the strengths of Jungle Tales of Tarzan is that it is easy to identify with a young Tarzan's loneliness and efforts to learn about the world, while the dumb and insensitive things he does make him feel very human.  

Thumbs up for Jungle Tales of Tarzan!