The Eternal Savage (AKA The Eternal Lover) by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"To you it has been but a few days since you left your Nat-ul to hunt down the ferocious Oo; but in reality countless ages have rolled by.  By some strange freak of fate you have remained unchanged during all these ages until now you step forth from your long sleep an unspoiled cave man of the stone age into the midst of the twentieth century, while I, doubtless, have been born and reborn a thousand times, merging from one incarnation to another until in this we are again united."

We recently read a letter Lin Carter sent to the February 1951 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories in which he offhandedly attacked Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Eternal Lover.  This spurred me to actually read this lesser known novel by the creator of John Carter and Tarzan, which I own in a water damaged Ace paperback edition sent to me by my brother in early 2019 in a box full of the ERB paperbacks we had both collected over the years.  The Eternal Lover first appeared in book form in 1925, a collection of the story of that name that debuted in All-Story Weekly in 1914 and its 1915 sequel, a serial of four parts entitled "Sweetheart Primeval" that appeared in the same magazine.  My 1972 Ace copy (21802) bears the title The Eternal Savage, which is slightly less appropriate but perhaps more marketable to Ace's target audience. 

In the first chapter of the book we meet Nu, son of Nu, a cave man living in the "Niocene," which is not really a period of prehistory recognized by the scientific community.  Nu, son of the chief, is the biggest and strongest member of his tribe.  Nu and cave maiden Nat-ul are in love, but Nat-ul won't consent to be Nu's mate until he has proven he is the best of the best by killing a saber-toothed tiger.  We accompany Nu as he hunts down just such a beast and decapitates it.  Then he takes cover in a cave during an earthquake and is entombed in there by a landslide.

In the second chapter we are on the African estate of none other than John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, the English aristocrat known to those who raised him as Tarzan!  We meet Victoria Custer, a Nebraskan who is as brave as a man and can hunt and shoot and ride as good as a man.  She and her brother Barney are visiting Tarzan and Jane, shooting down all manner of wildlife in pursuit of adventure and recreation.  Victoria has some idiosyncrasies to her character.  For one thing, the thought of an earthquake, and the sight of canyons and cracks in the earth that remind her of earthquakes, fill her with an irrational fear.  For another, she often dreams of a white savage carrying a stone-headed spear, and is quite in love with this dream man, so much so that she has refused to countenance marrying any of her many suitors.  Her most attractive suitor has been William Curtiss, and when this guy shows up at Tarzan's estate to press his suit anew she is about to finally agree when there is an earthquake and she gets the willies.  

This very same earthquake uncovers the cave wherein Nu has slept for 100,000 years!  He emerges just as young and strong as if he was buried alive just yesterday!  There follow the kinds of tracking and hunting and man vs beast fights we expect to find in a Tarzan story (Burroughs is not really stretching himself into new territory in this book), and a few chapters later Victoria is in the cave nursing a wounded Nu back to health, he having rescued her from a huge lion and been wounded in the process, and she, drawn by love of the naked savage she recognized as the man of her dreams, having tracked hi down him with the help of one of Tarzan's wolfhounds.            

While Nu is still recuperating, Victoria is captured by a dozen Arab slavers and their company of black lackeys and carried off.  Tarzan, Barney, Curtiss and the rest catch up to Nu and the cave man recuperates for a few weeks as a prisoner at the Greystoke estate; Curtiss thinks this wild man murdered Victoria and wants to hand him over to the government or just kill him, but Barney, Victoria's confidant, knows all about his sister's dreams and is sure the cave man loves Victoria and may even be able to lead them to her as soon as he learns English.  (This stressful period exposes weaknesses in Curtiss's character--he even calls Nu a "white n*****," using the powerful word people like me are too afraid to say, in fact too afraid to type!)  Nu escapes with the wolfhound, who is now his bosom comrade, and they search for Victoria, the reincarnation of Nat-ul, following the trail of black villages despoiled by the murderous Arab slavers and their cannibal crew.  Nu catches up to Victoria while she is being abused by an Arab, and slays him.

The eternal lovers are together again.  But Victoria/Nat-ul vacillates--could she be happy living in the jungle after growing up in a world of modern conveniences?  Could Nu be happy in a world of motor cars and paved streets, cinemas and stores?  When Nu recognizes that his beloved is considering ending their relationship he puts his spear to his breast and Victoria has to commit herself to abandoning civilization for him to dissuade him from committing suicide on the spot.  Those are some extreme relationship tactics there, cave man!

A party from the Greystoke estate has also been following the Arab slavers, having learned they had Victoria, and Curtiss arrives just as Nu and Victoria are embracing.  Curtiss trains his rifle on the cave man but is killed by the loyal wolfhound before he can pull the trigger.

So ends Part One of The Eternal Savage.  As Part Two begins Nu and Victoria are back in the cave from which Nu emerged, and another earthquake hits, and when she recovers from being knocked out, Victoria finds herself in Nat-ul's body, 100,000 years ago, in Nu's world of mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, pterodactyls and plesiosaurs, among the tribe of Nu's father.  Soon she regards her memories of the 20th century as just a particularly vivid dream!

Nu is away hunting and a scoundrel named Hud carries Nat-ul off, hoping that, separated from the incomparable hunk that is the son of the chief, that he can persuade her to be his mate.  (Hud won't rape Nat-ul--one of Burroughs' themes in this book is that white men, even white cave men, don't rape women or otherwise mistreat them, that that behavior is the province of Arabs and blacks.)

Such reveries made Nu very sad, for he loved Nat-ul just as you or I would love--just as normal white men have always loved--with a devotion that placed the object of his affection upon a pedestal before which he was happy to bow down and worship.  His passion was not of the brute type of the inferior races which oftentimes solemnizes the marriage ceremony with a cudgel and ever places the woman in the position of an inferior and a chattel.

...the men of the tribe of Nu had not taken their mates by force for many generations.  There was a strong belief among them that the children of women who mated through their own choice were more beautiful, better natured and braver than those whose mothers were little better than prisoners and slaves.

When Nu wakes up he is also in the "Niocene" world of 100,000 years ago, just after he first fell into suspended animation, but somehow he doesn't remember that he has already killed a saber-tooth and so continues hunting for one.  While the forward "time travel" elements in Part One were silly, they were at least internally consistent, and they had an element of pathos, so we could accept them the way we accept silly stuff in SF all the time if they facilitate an exciting plot or present opportunities for interesting psychological effects on the characters.  Nu and Victoria's time travel backward in Part Two, however, are just a mess and take you out of the story a little.  Burroughs actually resolves these problems in the last pages of the book, but in a way that throws out the baby with the bathwater.

Nat-ul kills Hud in a sneak attack (Nu and Nat-ul behave absolutely ruthlessly in Part Two of this novel) and heads back to the tribe's caves.  Meanwhile, Nu's father Nu finds Nu and alerts him to the fact that the tribe is moving away from this earthquake prone region, northwards; when he is done hunting Nu will be able to catch up with them, the tribe marching at the speed of its slowest members, the children and the oldsters, after all.  Nu then kills a cave bear and figures that is about as good a kill as a sabre-tooth tiger and heads after the tribe.

Nat-ul was not around to hear about the tribe's decision to move, and when she finds the tribe gone she takes a guess and as to their course and heads off in the wrong direction, southwards.  When Nu reaches the tribe and Nat-ul is not there he follows her trail to the vicinity of a village of fishermen, where it abruptly disappears.  Nat-ul was fleeing from a horny fisherman, Tur, when a flying reptile seized her and took her to an island in the nearby sea, a body of water that will no longer exist in modern times.  Tur paddles off after her in a little boat made from a tree trunk; Nu spies on the village, susses out what is going on, and steals a boat for himself, killing three innocent men in the course of this act of larceny..  On the way to the island Nu has to fight a plesiosaur--Burroughs tells us this sea is full of "ferocious reptilia," that "All around him [Nu] the sea was alive with preying monsters...Titanic duels were in progress upon every hand...."  The ten-year-old who endures inside of me found this to be awesome.

Nat-ul fights her way out of the giant pterodactyl nest, climbs down a spire, climbs down a cliff, escapes some apes, and then is recaptured by Tur, who takes her back to the fisher village on the mainland.  Nu, after fighting his way to the island, then has to fight his way back to the village through all those aquatic reptiles.  (One of the structural issues with The Eternal Savage is that instead of the characters traveling to successive fresh new locations they keep bouncing back and forth between a limited number of locations.)  At the village Nu rescues Nat-ul, who escapes, but is captured himself.

Tur has a mate, Gron, who is enraged that Tur was trying to cheat on her; she wanted to tear Nat-ul's eyes out, but now that Nat-ul is gone, she vents her rage on Nu until she is dragged off our hero.  For this misbehavior, the chief of the fisher village ("Does a woman rule my people?" he demands) orders Tur to beat Gron and abandon her for a new mate.  Nu gives a defiant speech about how the fisher people suck.  The men of the fisher village labor like drudges--building boats and huts--while the men of Nu's cave-dwelling tribe hunt and fight.  The men of Nu's tribe wear the skins of the lions and tigers and bears they have outfought, a sign of their prowess--the fishermen wear the hides of mere herbivores.  And Nu's people don't mistreat women!

Lurking outside the village, Nat-ul sees that Nu is going to be tortured to death by being roasted slowly over many hours.  (Oh yeah, the Nu tribe doesn't torture malefactors, just executes them with dispatch.)  Fortunately, after escaping death at the claws of beasts, she is reunited with her and Nu's tribe--the tribe, soon after Nu left in search of his beloved, decided to delay their trip north and follow Nu.  Nat-ul leads her people to the fisher village, which they take in an assault, only to find that Nu is not there!  

Nu, we learn, was liberated by the vengeful Gron, she seeking to deny Tur and her chief the pleasure of watching Nu be cooked to death.  Gron also cherishes hopes that she will get revenge on Tur for his infidelity by having sex with Nu, who is far hunkier than any of the fishermen.  More spectacularly, before engineering Nu's escape from the roaster, Gron went all Medea on us and killed her and Tur's infant son.           

Nu and Gron have fled via boat, and end up on a different island, where Nu's ability to fight and to climb cliffs and the decent way he treats her lead Gron to fall in love with him.  Meanwhile, Nat-ul, looking for Nu, is captured by Tur, who has escaped the fall of his village alive.  Tur takes her, by coincidence, to the same island Nu and Gron are on, where the tricky Nat-ul gets the jump on him and knocks him unconscious so she can escape.  Nat-ul evades additional hazards on her own until she is captured by the natives of the island, people who herd aurochs, and then rescued by Nu.  The eternal lovers are reunited!  Soon after, Tur and Gron, our worst case scenario couple, are also reunited.  Tur tries to murder our ideal couple by rolling a boulder down on them, but Gron attacks Tur from behind and kills him and then commits suicide.

I would have been happy if the novel ended there with vivid contrasting images of the love that makes life worth living and the love that leads to murder and self-murder, but Burroughs finishes his tale up in a way that is deflating and irritating, fixing a few problems with his narrative but causing new--worse!--ones.  Nu and Nat-ul make it back to their tribe and their caves, but then an earthquake strikes and the entire tribe is wiped out.  Victoria wakes up and we learn that much of this book we have been reading was just a dream!  I guess the adventures in the "Niocene" may have been true facts, Victoria's memories of a past life that were spurred by an earthquake or something, but it seems that the 20th century adventures--Nu's awakening in the 20th century, the march of the Arab slavers, Curtiss being killed by a dog--were just wholly fantastical products of Victoria's subconscious.  This undermines the whole book!

Looks like Lin Carter had a point!    

Well, I enjoyed all the scenes of people tracking, people chasing, people climbing cliffs and people fighting plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, lions, tigers and bears and each other.  The subplot that revolves around Gron the scorned jealous woman is good.  And all the stuff about race and sex will give you a jolt--looks like All-Story Weekly wasn't being policed by the government for misinformation, disinformation and malinformation!  There is also the provocative idea that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is superior to settling down to agriculture and village life, an argument I heard made by Leninists when I was in grad school and more recently by some libertarians on podcasts.  

So I am giving The Eternal Savage a thumbs up.  But there are obviously problems with the book, some of which I have pointed out above, problems that are primarily structural.  The two parts, the first of which I guess corresponds to the original story "The Eternal Lover" and the second to the serial "Sweetheart Primeval," are not well integrated.  The first part of the book gets some energy from the fish-out-of-water aspect of Nu finding himself in the 20th century and from the eeriness of Victoria realizing that she is the reincarnated Nat-ul and the ways that Nat-ul's knowledge enters her modern brain, but Part Two, until the very ending, dispenses with those weird aspects and is just an adventure about cave people that is not at all linked to the 20th century or time travel.  The way Burroughs pulls the rug out from under Part One in Part Two is very frustrating--all the love jazz, all the fighting and death that we invested our interest and emotions in just didn't happen?  

So, not a great Burroughs novel, but the bulk of the text is certainly fun.