Three SF stories by Thomas M. Disch

As Joachim Boaz reminded us via twitter, Thomas M. Disch’s birthday was this month. I recently enjoyed some of Disch’s art criticism, and his fine novel, On Wings of Song, so I decided to read (and reread) some stories from the 1980 Bantam collection Fundamental Disch. I’m not crazy about the cover (a pun on “mental,” I guess) but a cover with a rocket ship or a sexy girl or a slavering monster wouldn’t really make sense, and maybe by 1980 the days of abstract Richard Powers covers were coming to a close.  Maybe a picture of the New York City skyline would have made sense.

The three stories I read today all fit into the conventional definition of “science fiction;” they all include telepathy, and two of them are about the future.

“102 H-Bombs” (1965)

This is the title story from an earlier Disch collection, and is, in part, a sort of satire of the United States military and the Cold War as well as an anti-war story. (Disch served briefly in the U S Army in the late 1950s; things didn’t work out.) It also seems like a faint reference to Isaac Asimov’s famous idea of “psycho-history.”

For decades the world has been gripped in a dreadful low intensity war following a political crisis around the year 2000, when much of New York City was bombed into rubble. Fortunately the Empire State Building was one of the few surviving buildings; now NYC (population three million) is mostly covered in federally-owned hydroponic agricultural facilities, leaving the ESB the last privately-owned building in town.

Charlie is the smartest member of a 28-boy-strong company of ten-year-old orphans, training in the MidWest under Drillmaster Grist. Charlie and Grist get an opportunity to go to New York, where Charlie and 101 other ten-year-old geniuses have been gathered by the firm that owns the ESB. Charlie becomes part of a complicated time-travelling conspiracy: robot agents of the inhabitants of the peaceful world of 3652 AD have come back in time to fix all the screwups that occurred in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ESB is their home base.

This is a good story. It includes many of the themes we see in Disch’s work; the MidWesterner who leaves his stifling home to find freedom and beauty in New York, the genius being used by the government to help the war effort, the way inexplicable outside forces manipulate our lives. This one has an essentially happy ending, though.

“Assassin and Son” (1964)

This is a quite good story, a pivotal day in the life of a young man living on an alien planet. Disch economically develops an intricate and vivid milieu, a planet inhabited by monarchical blob people which is used by the Earth as a sort of penal colony. The blobs have a powerful taboo against murder, but are approximately as corrupt as humans, and so the humans on the blob planet are employed as assassins in the blobs’ many personal and political disputes. In this short tale Disch manages to get across his common themes about how religion is a scam and how our lives are out of our control, while also delivering good characters and a solid plot about family relationships and cross-cultural and cross-class relationships. I read this years ago, and reread it yesterday; I really like it.

“The Roaches” (1965)

This story is good, another I have read before. I think this is one of Disch’s more famous stories, widely anthologized in horror collections.

A young woman from the MidWest moves to Manhattan where things don’t go so well for her. She wages a ceaseless war against the roaches in her apartment, until finally realizing she can telepathically communicate with the insects; the roaches fall in love with her and are eager to follow her commands. She becomes their queen and (with no family, no boyfriend, no friends even) she returns their love! The final image the story leaves you with is of all the roaches in the city converging on a single apartment building to be with their beloved ruler.

I probably like the “life in NYC” aspects of the story more than the SF/horror elements. I’ve lived in four different Manhattan apartments and one apartment in Queens, and I have fought my own wars with roaches.

**********

So, a very good story and two good stories.  Tomorrow I will read more stories from Fundamental Disch. 

Beasts of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

At the start of the third Tarzan book our hero Lord Greystoke is living in London with his wife Jane and their infant baby son. Tarzan learns that one of civilization’s many discontents is the servant problem when it turns out that one of his servants is working for Nikolas Rokoff, the evil freelance spy. Rokoff has escaped from a French prison, and with the help of the untrustworthy servant kidnaps Tarzan’s son! Tarzan and Jane go after him and blunder into a trap, ending up imprisoned in separate cells on Rokoff’s ship.

Instead of blowing up or immolating or just shooting Tarzan, Rokoff throws the ape-man into the briar patch, marooning him on a jungle island full of apes and lions. Rokoff also plans to put Tarzan’s son up for adoption among a tribe of cannibals. Rokoff has some pretty weird theories on what constitutes satisfactory vengeance.

Tarzan killed four lions in the last book, and it was not long before one of Jungle Island’s lions has fallen prey to Tarzan’s grass rope and stone knife. But Tarzan doesn’t set out to depopulate the entire island; instead he makes friends with a panther, a tribe of apes, and a black warrior whose party got lost when their war-canoe got caught in a storm.

After leading this rag tag group to the mainland, Tarzan pursues Rokoff through the jungle. Rokoff and Tarzan visit an endless succession of native villages, at each trying to get information and win allies. Sometimes the Africans help, sometimes they are a menace. Eventually Rokoff meets a horrible death and Jane and Tarzan are reunited, shipwrecked on Jungle Island. A ship with a multicultural crew of mutineers (it’s a lucky ship that reaches its planned destination in these Tarzan books) comes by, which Tarzan and company are able to sieze. The End.

Beasts of Tarzan is inferior to the first two Tarzan books. The many native villages Tarzan and Rokoff visit are simply not as distinctive and exciting as Paris, Algeria, Opar, or the ape society Tarzan grew up in. Similarly, Tarzan’s allies in this book, a panther, some apes, and an African warrior, are not as interesting as the various Arabs and the priestess of Opar who helped Tarzan in Return of Tarzan. A panther can’t talk, and Burroughs doesn’t go to the trouble of devising any interesting dialogue for the apes or the African. He does a little better with the Swedish cook on Rokoff’s ship, but this guy doesn’t survive very long, and Burroughs tries to make him serve two purposes, both as comic relief and as a tragic figure, diminishing his impact.

Another problem is how Burroughs keeps switching back and forth between Tarzan’s and Jane’s adventures. Both of them are running through the jungle, either pursuing or pursued by Rokoff. Burroughs kills much of the suspense of the chapters starring Jane by telegraphing their outcome before we even read them. For example, at the end of a Tarzan chapter Tarzan finds the Swede, critically wounded. The Swede quickly expires. Then we get a Jane chapter, which describes Jane’s journey through the jungle with the Swede. This sequence would have been more effective if we didn’t already know that the Swede wasn’t going to make it. Burroughs does this three or four times, telling us the outcome of an episode before narrating the episode, and it is an unfortunate practice. (Maybe this technique was more effective when the novel was split up over five issues of a magazine, as it was when it first appeared in 1914.)

The death of Rokoff should be the climax of the story, but after the Russian spy is defeated Burroughs introduces a whole new set of villains who only last for two chapters. Finally, I found it a little annoying that halfway through the novel it turns out that dumbass Rokoff hadn’t really spirited Tarzan’s son from England to Africa; Tarzan and Jane’s baby is safe back home, this kid is some nameless orphan! This whole adventure is a mistake! Blehhhh….

Perhaps notable is that Tarzan in this book does that thing he did in all those black and white movies I saw on TV as a kid in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the thing that made Carol Burnett’s career; he yells and animals come to help him. He also wrestles his first crocodile; I seem to recall b&w Tarzan doing that a lot. Also, Jane shoots people with a rifle and pummels a guy unconscious with a revolver.  I know people are always complaining that these old adventure stories are full of women who faint at any sign of danger; here is a contrary example.

Beasts of Tarzan was just OK. There is little that is new in it; it’s Tarzan dealing with Rokoff and a bunch of African villages and tribes, and Burroughs did a better job with Rokoff and black Africans in the last book. Hopefully Burroughs will come up with something better in his fourth ape-man novel, Son of Tarzan.

The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Return of Tarzan is the second Tarzan novel, first appearing in a magazine in 1913.  The book has gone through many editions, many with fine cover art.  If you want to see a great selection of art related to Return of Tarzan, and all kinds of cool publication info, check out ERBzine's awesome page on the novel.   I went the cheapass route with this one, and read a free electronic text.  I don't mind reading on the computer or the i-phone, but the texts I found did not have italics, which is a little annoying, as foreign words which Burroughs put in italics, like douar or spahi, appear in all caps.  Burroughs, stop yelling at me!

Jane Porter, Southern belle, is engaged to John Clayton, a good guy whom most of the world believes to be the legitimate Lord Greystoke, even though she loves Tarzan the Ape-Man, the real Lord Greystoke.  Tarzan spends months on an ocean liner and in Paris, hanging out with his naval officer buddy D'Arnot, reading books and going to art exhibits, attending the opera and drinking absinth.  Sounds like the good life!  But Tarzan is lonely, missing both Jane and his jungle life.  And of course he gets involved with some Russian spies.

Russian beauty Olga is married to a French government minister, and both seem like good sorts, but Olga's brother Nikolas is an unscrupulous jerk off who is always trying to use Olga's position to steal some French government secrets to sell to the czar or maybe some other foreign power.  When Tarzan foils his various schemes to blackmail Olga or her husband, Nikolas hires ten thugs to murder Tarzan in a disreputable part of Paris.  Tarzan outfights these creeps hand to hand and declares that this is the only entertainment he has had since he left the jungle!  Are you forgetting the opera, Tarzan?

His time spent in civilization provides Tarzan numerous opportunities to put on his misanthrope cap and opine that the jungle is safer, and jungle beasts more admirable, than civilized human beings.  You can only imagine what Tarzan is going to say about us civilized people when we've got World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, World War II and the Holocaust under our belts.  You don't like civilization now, Tarzan?  We're just getting started!

In Chapter 7 Tarzan is in North Africa on an espionage mission for the French government, disguised as an American hunter.  Burroughs, who in Chapter 6 informed us that Frenchmen are impulsive, lets us know in Chapter 8 that "if there is one thing an Arab despises, it is a talkative man."  Luckily our man Tarzan is a man of few words, and he makes several valuable Arab friends.  In fact, Tarzan prefers the Arabs ("stern and dignified warriors") and their lives ("filled with danger and hardship") to the "effeminate civilization of the great cities he had visited."  Tarzan, are you dissing the opera?

Tarzan gets on a ship for South Africa, and the Russian spies toss him overboard.  Tarzan is of course a great swimmer, and luckily the Russians threw him overboard close to the very jungle where he grew up!  Tarzan is thrilled to be back home, and even makes friends with a tribe of elephant hunters.  The Africans in Tarzan of the Apes were all cannibals with filed teeth whom Tarzan would kill out of hand, but the members of this tribe, the Waziri, are a better sort.  Evincing an attitude that today might land Tarzan (or Burroughs) in sensitivity training, Tarzan notes that these blacks don't have flat noses and thick lips like the "typical West African savage."  (This actually reminds me of something Henry Miller says about W. E. B. DuBois in The Rosy Crucifixion.)  It turns out that this tribe arrived down here a generation ago, fleeing from Arab slavers.

The Waziri guide Tarzan to the lost city of Opar, which is full of gold and a race of degenerate men; luckily the women of Opar have not degenerated, and are still sexy.  The high priestess of Opar protects Tarzan from the men, and gives Burroughs a chance to take a dig at religion - the high priestess is a sham who does not believe her own religion, and even says in Chapter 22, "The more one knows of one's religion the less one believes...."  

While Tarzan is busy with the Waziri and the high priestess of Opar, the bulk of the remainder of the cast - Jane, her father and servant, Clayton and Nikolas - gets shipwrecked on the West African coast.  I thought the scenes in the boat, with everybody starving and considering cannibalism, effectively macabre.  Once they make it to the jungle Jane is so disappointed in Clayton's inability to fight lions that she calls off their marriage.  The Oparians, looking for the fugitive Tarzan, capture Jane, and Tarzan rescues her.  Clayton dies of a fever, D'Arnot's ship arrives to rescue everybody and arrest Nikolas, and Tarzan steals a bazillion dollars worth of gold from Opar, so the way is paved for Tarzan and Jane to be married in the final chapter, Chapter 26.  This book has a high body count, but still a happy ending for our hero and his "mate."          

Return of Tarzan is a great adventure story, with a surfeit of exotic locations and people, beautiful girls, monstrous villains, and plenty of fights with men and with beasts (Tarzan really puts a dent in the lion population in this one.)  Part of the book's charm is in how appealing a character Tarzan is.  Burroughs does a good job with the fish out of water aspects of Tarzan's character, even using it as a source of jokes, like this one in Chapter 10:

He longed for a friend who loved the same wild life that he loved. He had learned to crave companionship, but it was his misfortune that most of the men he knew preferred immaculate linen and their clubs to nakedness and the jungle. It was, of course, difficult to understand, yet it was very evident that they did. 

I am skeptical of comic relief in adventure stories, as it is often distracting and diminishes the tension that I think is an important element of a good adventure story, but this kind of joke doesn't take you out of the story, and is entirely based on the character, and even helps give you a feeling for the character and his emotions.

(We get an example of a distracting joke when Jane's father, the absent-minded professor, while stranded on the West African coast, suddenly recalls there is a book he wants to read and gets in a row boat and tries to row his way to a New York library.)

Tarzan is also appealing because of his passion, his big emotions, his enthusiasm about life.  Burroughs conveys how much Tarzan enjoys the hunt, enjoys fighting, enjoys eating the raw meat that he himself has brought down.  Tarzan several times is compared to a child; each time a new adventure comes his way Tarzan is eager to embark on it, like a child discovering a new toy.  Tarzan (in the jungle at least) is not only free of laws and social obligations, but is free to express his emotions: when Olga is in his arms he impulsively kisses her, when Jane is in danger he explodes in a furious rage, when he defeats a foe he puts his foot on the cadaver's neck and lets loose a triumphant animal scream, announcing to the world that he is still alive, a survivor and a winner.  So much of the time we have to follow the rules, do what we are told, stifle or hide our emotions, that it is exciting to see someone who need not do so.

Return of Tarzan isn't without problems.  As Gore Vidal points out in his article "Revisiting Tarzan," Burroughs uses too many incredible coincidences.  Everything seems to happen when Tarzan is around: the slavers have not attacked the Waziri in decades, but they attack right after Tarzan joins the tribe; Jane and Tarzan are apart for months, and then the exact minute Jane is about to be killed by a lion or as a human sacrifice is the minute Tarzan comes on the scene.  Some people may be dismayed by the book's racial, class and gender politics.  (Women are always falling in love with Tarzan; when the survivors on the boat vote on what to do, Jane doesn't get to vote!)  I didn't find it difficult to just shrug these things off; fiction is full of wacky coincidences, and Burroughs has admirable as well as despicable Russians, Arabs, and blacks, and Jane and other women sometimes display bravery and level heads in danger.

Return of Tarzan is great fun, and I am looking forward to the third Tarzan caper, Beasts of Tarzan.   
      

Return of Gallery of Horror: Bloch, Campbell, and Dozois & Dann

The original hardcover edition

In honor of William L. Trotter and in hopes of finding some good early 1980s horror fiction, let’s give Gallery of Horror another stab.

“Rubber Room” by Robert Bloch

I’m often disappointed by Robert Bloch. But I keep giving him a chance.

“Rubber Room” is about Emery, a bookish paranoid anti-Semitic murderer. Like Norman Bates, his insanity is linked to an overbearing mother. Because his mother hated Jews and he reads lots of books about World War II, Emery becomes a neo-Nazi hermit, collecting Nazi paraphernalia from antique stores. He goes totally insane, thinking that everything that happens to him is because of Jewish terrorists, and then when a little lost girl he meets on the street turns out to be Jewish, he kills her. The police put him in a padded cell, where, it appears, he is killed by the ghost of a terrorist who died in the same padded room earlier in the month.

This story, first published in 1980, is just OK.  Based on the title, I was hoping for it to be more about claustrophobia and the anxiety resulting from being all alone in a tiny room.  For some reason I always find the scenes in novels in which a guy is in a prison cell and counts all the bricks and becomes familiar with every crack in the wall and taps out messages to the other prisoners and loses track of the days and all that very engaging.

"Rubber Room" doesn't have anything new or compelling to say about anti-Semites or child killers, so one wonders if those elements were just introduced in hopes of easily manipulating the reader.  Maybe when "Rubber Room" came out neo-Nazis and child molesters didn't feel tired yet, the way Norman Bates must have felt fresh before we'd all seen three thousand episodes of "Law & Order: Perverts Division."

When the ghost appears to kill Emery I thought it might be the ghost of the little girl or of her grandfather, who was murdered by Nazis in World War II, making the book a Jewish revenge story.  But the ghost turns out to be that of an insane terrorist, presumably not Jewish, making the story a piece of irony with a twist ending: the crazy dude who stupidly fears the ski-mask wearing terrorists he thinks are financed by Jews is actually killed by a crazy ski-mask wearing terrorist who is not financed by Jews.  

"Rubber Room" may be interesting as a period piece, with its numerous references to ski-mask-wearing terrorists ("In today's world, terror wears a ski-mask"); do we still think of terrorists as wearing ski masks? Comparing popular depictions of terrorists during the Cold War to those of the post-Soviet or post-September 11 period would be an interesting dissertation.  Likely been done already.

“The Sunshine Club” by Ramsey Campbell

This is a silly story about a vampire psychiatrist who tricks vampires into thinking they are not vampires at all, that their fear of sun, garlic and crosses is just the result of a difficult relationship with their parents. Oh brother.

This is one of those stories in which two guys are in a room, sitting with a desk between them, and the guy behind the desk gets up, and so I’m visualizing that he is away from the desk. Then suddenly he is writing on his blotter, like he’s back at the desk again, so I go back through the text to see if the writer told us he had returned to the desk, and I find we were not notified of the guy’s return to his desk. I find this sort of thing distracting. When I say a writer has a smooth style, which I feel like I often do, part of it is that he or she makes sure stuff like this doesn’t happen.

I’ve read several Ramsey Campbell stories, and I think the only ones I really liked were a brief mad scientist one, “Heading Home,” and “Out of Copyright,” a clever piece of work about a corrupt anthologist accidentally casting a spell that causes disaster.  Mad scientists and scholarly wizard guys appeal to me; vampire psychiatrists and werewolf psychiatrists don't appeal to me.

“Down Among the Dead Men” by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

More Nazis and more vampires! But this story is definitely better than the Bloch and Campbell stories.

Bruckman and Wernecke are Jews in a Nazi death camp, where the prisoners are being worked to death excavating a quarry. One day Bruckman realizes that Wernecke is a vampire! Wernecke surreptitiously drinks the blood of the other prisoners, just a little from the healthier Jews, but actually murdering and draining those known as Muselmänner, prisoners so weak that they have given up any hope of surviving. Bruckman is shocked; Wernecke has been the kindest of the prisoners, a sort of leader, always helping by sharing food or encouraging the dejected. Wernecke, when confronted, admits that he did this the way a farmer maintains his livestock – he thinks of the other Jews as his cattle to be nurtured and fed upon! How is Bruckman to react to this nightmarish situation?  Will the Red Army liberate the camp before Wernecke makes a meal of him?  Or does he have to fight Wernecke?  Does he have a moral obligation to protect his fellow prisoners from Wernecke?

This story is well plotted and well paced, and the audacity and originality of setting a Jewish vampire story in the middle of the Holocaust makes it memorable, striking. I wonder if anybody found it offensive when it was first published in 1982 in Oui, a pornographic magazine, or when it first appeared in this anthology in 1983.  Offensive or not, Dozois and Dann are giving Tanith Lee a run for her money when it comes to the competition for best story in this book.


********

So, out of five stories, we have two I like, two I don't like, and one mediocrity.  Not so bad I guess.

Tanith Lee & Michael Bishop Horror Stories from 1983

On the weekend I purchased this 1997 paperback edition of a 1983 anthology of horror stories (note the skulls and crows on the cover - scary!) at Half Price Books for one dollar because there were stories in it by Michael Bishop and Tanith Lee.  Gallery of Horror (hardcover title: The Dodd Mead Gallery of Horror) was edited by Charles L. Grant.  On the first page a very cool stamp indicates the book was once in the library of a William L. Trotter.  Trotter must have been a serious reader; if the pen marks on the contents page are his, he read every story and even noted how many pages long each one was!  When I get an anthology like this I usually look at the contents page, dismiss half the authors because I have never heard of them, a third of the authors because I have heard of them and don't like them or don't care about them, then read one or two of the remaining handful of stories.  I envy your discipline Mr. Trotter!

So far I've read two of the included stories, those by Michael Bishop and Tanith Lee, whose work I have discussed a little on this blog before.

"Gravid Babies" by Michael Bishop

Written in the present tense, "Gravid Babies" is a humor piece (bleh) about an academic couple in Carrion City, Colorado, where the sole significant employer is a hospital for werewolves.  Mary is the head psychiatrist at the hospital; she also works to promote the large oeuvre of the popular female novelist who provided the scholarship that financed Mary's education and who financed the construction of the hospital.  Her husband Russell is a stay-at-home dad who is taking a correspondence course that trains ghostwriters of celebrity biographies.  One of his assignments is to copy chapters word for word, long hand, from Rousseau's Confessions.  Another is to pen chapters of an autobiography "of an unforgettable character."  Mary arranges for Russell to have an interview with a werewolf to provide him raw material for this assignment, and disaster ensues after the werewolf bites Mary and Russell's infant daughter.

I am not interested in horror comedy, horror parodies, horror satires.  Edward Gorey, Charles Adams, Gahan Wilson, the "Scream" movies, "Shaun of the Dead," Hello Kitty as Cthulhu, all that stuff leaves me cold.  I am also sick of humor based on pop culture references like you find on "The Simpsons" or "South Park," both of which I enjoyed for their first five or ten seasons.  So I am not the audience for "Gravid Babies," with its jocular references to Hollywood werewolves (like calling lycanthropy "Chaney's Syndrome"), 1983 personages like Studs Terkel, Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan, David Stockman, and Donkey Kong, and even Peanuts (a day care center is named after Lucy van Pelt.)  Some of the jokes are clever, but didn't make me laugh, and I suppose the idea of a prepubescent girl giving birth to a litter of dogs is pretty horrible, but in the context of this silly jokey story it didn't horrify me.

So, thumbs down for this one. 

"Nunc Dimittis" by Tanith Lee

All you classical scholars and devoted Catholics out there already know that nunc dimittis means "now you dismiss."

This is one of Lee's stories in which she romanticizes, or at least makes sympathetic, decadent, perverted, and evil people.  I guess you could say this is a kind of mood piece, sad and sentimental, but also a bit twisted.  There is a lot of description of people's beautiful hair and clothes, people are said to move like dancers, beyond the rain-spattered window stand gaunt and leafless trees in the grey morning light, that sort of thing.  When I see those pale women in black clothes with long black hair (I used to see them out east on the street and in the subway, now I just see them on TV selling mummies and automatons) I always think this is what they are going for. 

A many-centuries old vampire princess living in an unspecified 20th century European city is growing weak, her beauty fading.  Her devoted servant, Vaselyu Gorin, is also feeling the years; in fact, though he retains his physical strength, in a few days he will be dead.  Gorin ventures out from the vampire's beautiful home into the town, sits in cafes sipping coffee and stalks the streets, looking for someone to replace him as the vampire's servant.  He encounters a beautiful young man with eyes like a leopard's pelt who calls himself Snake.  Snake survives by mugging old people and acting as a bisexual gigolo and prostitute.  A perfect candidate.  Over the next few days Gorin watches jealously as Snake goes through the same process Gorin himself went through over a century ago.  When Gorin heads off to his grave he knows that the vampire princess, who raised him from the gutter and taught him to love fine art and music, took him all over the world and taught him eight languages, will do the same for Snake, and that in turn Snake will revivify her, and she will once again plague the populace, a beautiful huntress.

This is a well-written and entertaining story, but at the same time you can see it as ridiculous.  Readers may laugh or roll their eyes at the names, for example.  (The princess's name is Darejan Draculas - the extra "s," Gorin tells Snake, denotes that she is from a different branch of the famous vampire family.)  The story is also ambiguous, even confusing.  To what extent is the reader supposed to admire and sympathize with these people because of their beauty, taste, and deep feelings, and to what extent be revolted by their crimes?  Is the story a reminder of the seductiveness of evil, or a subtle dig at aristocrats (or rich people in general) who may have good qualities and abilities but take advantage of their inferiors?  Could it be a story about the sacrifices people make for love, or how those we love exploit us?

Maybe one of the strengths of the story is that, while it is pretty clear what is going on, what it means and how we feel about it is reflective of the reader's own beliefs and experiences.  "Nunc Dimittis" is worth reading, in any case.

*************

So far, one for two, as people who watch sports say.  And "batting .500."  I think they also say that.  I will probably read a few more stories in this collection before issuing a final ruling.  I wish old William L. Trotter had put a grade next to each title, as well as a check mark and page count.  Then I could admire his taste as well as his discipline, impressive stamp, and arithmetical skills.     

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs & "Tarzan Revisited" by Gore Vidal

I first read Tarzan of the Apes, the first Tarzan book, while I lived in New York, probably over ten years ago. I don't recall what edition I read, maybe one my brother loaned me. I thought it was a great novel. Soon after I read it my wife (then my girlfriend) and I went with my father to the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, one of the many fascinating attractions which abound within the confines of NYC. I got on my wife's nerves by pretending I had lived my early life as had Lord Greystoke, and kept looking at a tree or flower and observing, "Ah, yes, it was in just such a tree that I lay in wait that time I ambushed a ferocious jaguar," or "It was into a patch of aromatic orchids such as these that one of my rivals among my tribe of apes threw me that time, into the path of a stampeding herd of elephants." The more annoyed she became, the funnier these ridiculous jokes seemed to me. Perhaps it is surprising that she married me.

Anyway, in the last two years I bought a copy of Tarzan of the Apes from a Goodwill a short distance from where I now live, the Signet Classic paperback edition from 1990.  The publisher, trying to class up this pulp action adventure, chose as a cover painting a 19th century depiction of Victoria Falls by Thomas Baines (which I believe is printed in reverse, to put the negative space on the back) and includes an "introduction" by Gore Vidal.  The publisher's scheme seems to have worked; my copy was at one point purchased from a University bookstore.  The cover painting choice does make the print on the back cover hard to read, though.  Well, there probably aren't many people who see the front cover and say, "What the hell is a tarzan?" 

Burroughs's novel first appeared in magazine form in 1912.  British aristocrats Lord and Lady Greystoke are marooned in West Africa by pirates, and struggle to survive.  They are killed shortly after giving birth to their son.  In a bizarre turn of events, a female ape, bereft after the death of her own son, takes up little Lord Greystoke, suckles him and raises him.  Given the name of Tarzan, which means "white skin," by the tribe of apes, Lord Greystoke grows up to be a skilled jungle hunter with animal-like senses and reflexes.  At the same time, Tarzan is able to take advantage of the books and other artifacts his parents left behind, and the weapons of a native tribe which moves into the area, so that his human cunning, knowledge and tools make him more than a match for the dangerous primates and felines who inhabit the savage jungle.

Burroughs' Africa seems to resemble the Africa of real life little more than his Mars (of the John Carter books) resembles the Mars of real life.  The apes who adopt Tarzan are a fictional species of relatively high intelligence who have a language and use crude musical instruments, for example, and I am skeptical that coconuts and pineapples grow in the wild in the real West Africa.  Still, if we suspend disbelief, as we do when reading so many other science-fiction and fantasy stories, we find that Burroughs' Africa is a thrilling setting for an adventure story.

I found the story of Tarzan's growth, both as an ape (he fights his way from strange interloper to leader of the tribe) and as a human (he gradually learns about his true heritage, how to read and how to use weapons) satisfying, and Burroughs has a good writing style that carries you forward smoothly; I was truly curious to see what would happen next to Tarzan, even though, of course, there is no chance Tarzan is going to get killed or humiliated.  Burroughs' speculations about how an intelligent ape or a man raised by apes would respond to human beings, their behavior and artifacts, are convincing and entertaining.  I don't understand how Tarzan learns to write his name in English, though, as he doesn't know what sounds correspond to what letters.

The story suffers a bit with the introduction of Jane Porter and her party in the second half of the book.  The American Porter, her academic father and his equally well-educated assistant, Porter's black servant Esmeralda, and English nobleman Clayton, are marooned by (a different set of) pirates in the same spot Tarzan's parents were marooned like 20 years before.  Besides the distracting coincidences (Clayton is Tarzan's cousin, for example), Professor Porter and his assistant, and Esmeralda, are all distracting comic relief characters.  The academics are caricatures of absent-minded professors (they are so busy arguing over the merits of Muslim civilization in the 15th century that they don't notice a lion creeping up on them) and Esmeralda is an hysterical "mammy" figure who faints when there is danger and says things like "Fo de good Lawd's sake, ain' Ah daid?" when she wakes up.

Strange to relate, the apes who adopt and raise the baby Tarzan: his loving foster mother, his put upon and jealous step father, and Tarzan's rivals for leadership of the tribe, are more compelling characters than the civilized humans in the novel.

The second half of the novel is also inferior plotwise to the struggles and education of Tarzan in the first half; Tarzan rescues the members of the Porter party, and a French naval officer, again and again, and there is a love quadrangle, Jane being pursued by Tarzan, Clayton the nobleman, and Canler, a rich American businessman.  I actually liked the scenes between Tarzan and Jane, the way each thinks the other is so beautiful and falls in love in a flash (we have all felt this way, or at least dreamed of feeling this way, right?) and how each fears that their being from different worlds makes a lasting relationship impossible.  The scenes with Clayton and Jane are not very well done and the scenes with Canler and Jane are worse.  Burroughs has reasons for including these characters, among them pointing out that the primitive man of action is more attractive to women than the traditional aristocrat or the modern bourgeois, but, looking at the book as a piece of entertainment, sometimes Clayton and more so Canler feel like needless complications that slow the book down and dilute the feelings of the reader. 

There are hundreds of interesting things to say about Tarzan of the Apes related to imperialism, racism, social class, nature vs nurture, the noble savage vs debased decadent civilized man, American perceptions of Englishmen and Frenchmen, Darwinian evolution and religious skepticism, but I'm sure they have all been said already.  Suffice to say that as well as being a good adventure story Tarzan is interesting as a view into the attitudes and beliefs of people a century ago.

The first half of Tarzan of the Apes is very good, the second half just OK.  We'll see what I think of the second Tarzan book soon enough.   

I read "Tarzan Revisited," the article by Gore Vidal that serves as introduction, after I had read Burroughs'  novel (and drafted all the paragraphs above), as I wanted to go into the book without any kind of preconceived notions, and because I figured it might be full of spoilers.  I've never read any fiction by Vidal; his books always seem to be about topics which don't interest me, like satires of Hollywood or fictionalized biographies of American politicians.  If I wanted to know about Aaron Burr wouldn't I just read a legit biography of him, or a history of the early American Republic, by a serious historian?

It could be that by avoiding Vidal I'm making a mistake and I'm missing out; this essay by Vidal, which first appeared in a magazine in 1963, is pretty good.  It is definitely better than what I have written here.  C'est la vie.  Vidal talks about his own relationship with Burroughs' books, compares Tarzan and John Carter to James Bond and Mike Hammer, criticizes Burroughs' style and praises Burroughs' action sequences, and laments that modern society increasingly stifles and bores the individual.  I think anybody interested in  Burroughs and genre fiction would enjoy it. 

Complete Peanuts 1989 - 1990

Good grief, it's more probably illegal comic strip scans and boring childhood reminiscences from MPorcius.

The 1989-90 volume of The Complete Peanuts is introduced by Lemony Snicket, whom I had thought was a fictional character until he turned up on the cover of the journal Poetry last year. I guess he hit it big after I left the bookstore. Snicket doesn't let on what he thinks about George W. Bush or South East Asian politics in his intro, leaving us to guess.

This volume feels a little weak compared to earlier ones.  There are way too many strips in which the punchline is "Snoopy loves cookies."  The idea of Snoopy being called for jury duty is a good one, for example, but this arc includes too many cookie jokes.  There are also too many strips which consist of Snoopy physically interacting with the sheet music that appears in the strips with Schroeder.  There is a dearth of the Schroeder strips which I like, those in which Lucy courts and is rejected by Schroeder. Those strips add depth and sympathy to Lucy's character; she may be a force of evil, but her interactions with Schroeder humanize her, show that she goes through the same painful unrealizable desires that so many of the other characters, and of course most of us readers, have endured.  The strips with Snoopy and Schroeder may be pleasant to look at and were likely fun for Schulz to draw, but they lack human feeling.

There are also lots of mediocre strips in which characters relate something about a grandparent.  Franklin shows up in most of these, either telling a story about his grandfather or listening to such a story from Charlie Brown or Linus.  I feel like Franklin was never really as fleshed out as most of the other characters, perhaps because most of the characters in Peanuts are defined by their insecurities, obsessions, or anti-social traits, and it would be risky for Schulz's only black character to be defined thus.  It would also be counterproductive for Franklin to have some weird character flaw if the point of him being in the strip is to express Schulz's opposition to racism.  So Franklin ends up being a sort of bland straight man.

(The index in this one also seems weak, with typos and some entries which fail to cite appropriate pages.  I know there are more than two strips about Charlie Brown's grandfather!  And there is no entry for Ellen Zwilich.)  

There are good things in this volume, just fewer than earlier ones.  The plot arc in which Marcie and "Charles" go to summer camp, but Peppermint Patty has to stay behind to attend summer school, is not bad.  Patty and Marcie both have a crush on Charlie Brown, and in one strip that took me by surprise Marcie torments Patty over the phone by claiming that "Charles" is nibbling on her ear!  Schulz wasn't lying when he said the strip wasn't made for little kids!

A few of the Peppermint Patty and Marcie strips in this issue address feminist issues.  I've sometimes wondered if there has been a feminist analysis of Peanuts, if feminists have complained of Schulz's depiction of the female characters, who are often villainous, like Lucy, Violet or the evil blond Patty (who grins while she physically assaults a boy in the very second Peanuts strip back in 1950), unobtainable goddesses like the red-haired girl or Miss Othmar, or, like, Sally Brown and Peppermint Patty, selfish, negligent, and academically incompetent.  And let's not forget the vain and vapid Frieda. 

When the female characters argue feminist points Schulz tends to make them look ridiculous.  There is a famous strip in which Lucy proclaims that scientists have discovered that women are superior to men.  (What scientists? someone asks.  Women scientists!)  In this volume Peppermint Patty is angered when the TV sports show only talks about mens' sports, so she marches down to the TV station to yell at the station manager; the manager turns out to be a woman.     

The late July- early August 1989 plot, in which a girl thinks Snoopy is a boy named Charlie Brown, is fun, maybe the highlight of that year.

The highpoint of the volume, however, is the "Brownie Charles" sequence which begins in July 1990.  At camp, Charlie Brown meets a pretty girl and falls in love (in a flash he forgets all about the red-haired girl back home) but is so nervous that he mangles his own name when she asks it, with the result that she calls him "Brownie Charles" throughout their entire relationship.  When I was in first grade I got so nervous that I similarly mangled my own name on the first day of school when talking to a teacher, an event mortifying enough that I still think about it with a shudder.  

So, despite my criticisms, the 1989-1990 strips are well worth a read.  Pigpen fans (I know you are out there) will be glad to know that in 1990 Pigpen gets his own story arc, in which he runs for class president.  The monstrous blonde Patty makes a walk on cameo in this arc.  Finally, the fact that the name of Garry Trudeau (whom Schulz in an 1987 interview denounced as unprofessional) is misspelled on the dust jacket is worth a laugh.