Tarzan the Untamed by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"She may be a German and a spy, but she is a woman--a white woman--I can't leave her here."

I've mentioned Edgar Rice Burroughs lately in connection with Lin Carter's Thongor books and Richard Lupoff's Crack in the Sky, so let's today read a book by the master himself, Tarzan the Untamed, the seventh Tarzan novel.  I'm reading a black Ballantine paperback from 1976 with a Boris Vallejo cover depicting Lord Greystoke confronted by a vulture, a book my brother must have purchased long ago and which entered the MPorcius Library when he sent our ERB collection to me from New Jersey, greatest state in the union and our childhood home.

Tarzan the Untamed was first published in book form in 1920.  The novel is a compilation of two separate magazine serials; "Tarzan the Untamed," which appeared across six issues of RedBook Magazine in 1919 and "Tarzan and the Valley of Luna," which was serialized across five issues of All-Story Weekly in early 1920.  (My copy of Scott Tracy Griffin's Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration suggests that the RedBook serial was titled "Tarzan and the Huns," but at the internet archive you can see some scans of 1919 issues of RedBook preserved on microfiche of somewhat dubious quality, and on at least some of the installments' title pages it says "Tarzan the Untamed," and I couldn't see "Tarzan and the Huns" on any of them.)   

Tarzan the Untamed begins in 1916, the first year of The Great War, and the first page of the novel is devoted to anti-German propaganda, as we see a German officer abusing black Africans and Burroughs refers to German atrocities in Belgium and makes sarcastic comments about "German civilization."  This brutal officer is a captain ("Hauptmann") leading an expedition of black soldiers into British East Africa.  When the expedition arrives at the Greystoke estate, the scene shifts to Tarzan, who is rushing home.  Tarzan finds his estate wrecked, and, among the dead and mutilated bodies of his black employees, killed in fierce battle with the German force, there is a body burned beyond recognition which he believes must be his wife Jane!  Tarzan vows revenge on the perpetrators and eternal hatred of the whole of German society!

Tarzan pursues the German despoilers; on the way he discovers a man-eating lion in a sort of gulch into which there is only a single narrow entrance.  Tarzan seals the entrance, trapping the lion.  When he captures the German captain (recently promoted to major!) whom Tarzan believes murdered Jane, he tosses this joker into the gulch to be devoured by the starving lion!  That is some rough justice, I suppose an illustration of enduring American and British bitterness over German responsibility for the War.  

Burroughs does a good job describing Tarzan's grief and his evolving response to witnessing the cruelty of mankind and to losing his main tie to civilization--Jane.  Burroughs really pours on the anti-civilization talk, including a passionate passage about how horrible clothes are, how they cover up the beauty of the human body:

...it had ever been beyond him to understand how clothes could be considered more beautiful than a clear, firm, healthy skin, or coat and trousers more graceful than the gentle curves of rounded muscles playing beneath a flexible hide.

(Tarzan's beliefs perhaps reflect the fact that he lived before the obesity epidemic.)

The traumatic loss of Jane and his estate has Tarzan wishing to divorce himself entirely from humanity; Burroughs tells us he "wanted only to be an ape."  But Lord Greystoke is a man, an Englishman, and his heart goes out to the British troops battling the Germans, and the sounds of the booming artillery, only a day's march away, won't permit him to forget the war.  So he begins helping the British war effort, guerilla style, sneaking behind enemy lines and killing Germans, capturing and training that starving lion so he can let the beast loose in a German trench, and so forth.  Tarzan also pursues a beautiful young woman he sees among the British command and then among German officers, taking her to be a German spy.  

Tarzan's feelings about characters like the nameless lion and this woman, Bertha Kircher, are at times ambiguous and his relationships with them evolve over the course of the novel, each relationship having its own narrative arc; this adds layers of interest to the main plot, which, as usual, consists of people travelling, fighting, being captured and escaping captivity.

Kircher, in particular, causes Tarzan no end of psychological dilemmas.  On the one hand she is a German spy, and he has sworn to destroy all Germans in response to their murder of Jane and their starting the World War (Tarzan hasn't been to college and so hasn't been told that World War One was really caused by crafty Wall Street bankers, or atavism, or sexual repression, or racism, or whatever the current academic fad is.)  So he hates her.  But she is also a white woman, and so he is unable to kill her with his own hands, and, though he tries to wash his hands of the matter when she gets in trouble, he finds himself irresistibly drawn to rescuing her, which service he performs multiple times across the course of Tarzan Untamed.

Kircher unwittingly leads Tarzan to the German captain who (it appears) is truly responsible for Jane's death--the guy Tarzan fed to a lion turns out to be not the expedition leader after all, but his brother.  Tarzan outfights the murderous captain and, ignoring his pleas for mercy, kills him.        

After the British have secured the upper hand in Africa, Tarzan heads off on his own, choosing to cross a wasteland, it being a shortcut to the current residence of a tribe of the species of apes who raised him, and to the little house in which he grew up, built by his shipwrecked parents.  Sick of human civilization, he wants to get back to his roots!  Taking this supposed shortcut is a blunder as this arid waste is crisscrossed with almost unpassable chasms and absolutely bereft of food and water--there aren't even any beetles to eat!  Fortunately, a vulture has followed Tarzan into this valley of death, and when Lord Greystoke collapses in exhaustion and the vulture comes down to eat him, our hero turns the tables on the vile bird; eating the vulture gives Tarzan the strength to reach the other side of the arid valley.  

In the fertile lands beyond the valley of death Tarzan spots a party of blacks who have deserted from their cruel German officers.  These guys are led by Sergeant Usanga, a man both treacherous and lecherous--when Usanga and crew killed their officers Usanga took captive one Bertha Kircher, that nineteen-year-old lady German spy.  Tarzan terrorizes Usanga's party, and his methods are ruthless; for example, he kills a straggler, decapitates him, and arranges for the marching Africans to come upon the pieces of their former comrade.  He, does, however, resist the urge to rescue the spy.  Deserters repeatedly try to rape the German spy but are always interrupted before they can accomplish their foul design; Kircher foils one such attempt by killing her assailant and escapes Usanga's group and ends up among Tarzan and the tribe of apes Greystoke has joined after asserting his dominance over them.

A third of the way through the book, Burroughs introduces a new character, Lieutenant Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick, Royal Air Force pilot.  Smith-Oldwick has to land to make repairs on his craft and is captured by the tribe in whose village Usanga's party is staying.  These villagers are cannibals and plan to cook the pilot up that night.  Tarzan has some bad luck and is also be captured by the villagers and added to tonight's menu; fortunately, the ape tribe Tarzan has just joined rescues him and the pilot just before cooking has begun.  Kircher is a member of the rescue party, which puts Tarzan in an uncomfortable spot--he now has something of a moral obligation to the German spy, a woman towards whose nationality he has sworn eternal enmity.    

Kircher and Smith-Oldwick are protected and provided for by Tarzan, but sense that they are holding back the ape man, who would like to go visit his childhood home, so one day when Tarzan is off hunting, the pilot convinces the spy that they should try to get to the plane and make it to a European settlement.  Of course, as soon as they are away from Tarzan they get captured by Usanga.

As a henpecked husband with delusions of grandeur, Usanga is a bit of a comic relief figure as well as a murderous villain set on raping Kircher.  The treacherous sergeant figures that if he can learn to fly the plane, his fellow blacks will worship him as a god and instead of having one domineering wife he can have 24 submissive wives, plus Kircher as a white wife, and so he forces Smith-Oldwick to give him flying lessons.

The bloody climax of this section of the novel, which is pretty racist what with all the talk of how unprincipled blacks are and how thick Usanga's lips are, but which is also pretty exciting and very entertaining, has Usanga trying to fly the plane away, the bound Kircher in the back seat; Usanga hopes to fly so far away that his formidable wife won't be able to find him and he can get to work enjoying Kircher's body and rounding up those 24 additional wives.  Tarzan intervenes, Kircher, who knows how to fly a plane, seizes the controls, Usanga is thrown from the plane to his death, and then the spy lands the plane, running down many of Usanga's men as she taxis to a stop.  Bertha Kircher does a lot of fighting and killing in this novel, and her running down her would-be rapists' henchmen with an aeroplane is just the kind of cathartic violence we read genre fiction in search of.  Kircher's bravery and resourcefulness also inspires Smith-Oldwick to fall in love with her, while at the same time Tarzan's heroic manliness--and perhaps his indifference to her?--leads Kircher to fall in love with the apeman.

The English pilot and German spy fly off, but over that arid wasteland a vulture blunders into the propellor and the aeroplane goes down.  Tarzan is watching and heads off to help them.  On the way he starts another relationship with a lion, Burroughs apparently feeling he has not mined this vein to exhaustion.  This lion is especially large and has a quite dark hide--this is a lion of a species Tarzan has not met before.  The great cat has been trapped in a pit dug by a black tribe, and Tarzan, who, as we have seen in earlier Tarzan adventures, loves top play practical jokes on the native Africans, frees the lion, and it becomes friendly with Lord Greystoke and comes and goes throughout the rest of the novel, offering aid to Tarzan at opportune moments.

Tarzan finds Kircher and Smith-Oldwick, but these kids can't seem to stay out of trouble.  At night people from a lost city that flourishes within a secret verdant valley in the middle of the arid waste attack and carry off the Englishman and the German woman; Tarzan is knocked out in the fight, but the friendly lion keeps the attackers from molesting our hero.  Tarzan follows the trail to the lost city, where he dons the garb of a soldier as one always does in these adventure stories and searches out Kircher and Smith-Oldwick.

The lost city in Tarzan the Untamed is a little gimmicky, and the sequences there are not quite as good as the previous World War and Usanga sections.  The inhabitants of the city are of some heretofore unknown ethnicity, with a skin color akin to that of Asians but with totally different features.  More importantly, every person in the city has one or more mental illnesses or nervous disorders.  Among the most memorable of these mental cases are a woman who is apparently a nymphomaniac and tries to get it on with everyman she meets, including Tarzan and Smith-Oldwick, and, a soldier who conveniently has an epileptic fit just as he is about to kill Tarzan with a saber.  Again and again we witness citizens of the lost city flying into murderous rages or laughing hysterically at some inappropriate stimulus or impulsively committing suicide.  Perhaps reflecting psychological theories that I'm guessing aren't taught in universities today, Tarzan, Smith-Oldwick and Kircher can tell just by looking at the city's denizens that they are "maniacs," and Smith-Oldwick says that their eyes and hair remind him of those of the inmates of a "madhouse" he once visited.

This city may be a satire of religion, as the maniacs worship parrots and monkeys it is suggested that their insanity is the result of their strange religious practices.  It is also an expression of the lioncentric nature of Tarzan the Untamed--the maniacs have domesticated a large number of lions and these lions serve as guard dogs and even cattle--lions are the primary source of meat for the city population.  Burroughs' depiction of the city is a little hard to credit; the place is in constant turmoil with people killing themselves and each other on a whim, but somehow the agricultural sector is very productive, with well-organized crops and a complex system of irrigation and animal husbandry. 

Kircher is to be the queen of these maniacs, and is tenanted with the current queen, an 80-year-old Englishwoman who has been imprisoned here since she was twenty.  As Kircher is bathed and clad in local fashion, which bares a woman's breasts (hubba hubba), this old woman tells her all about the town, its history and politics and so forth.  There is a lot of mayhem as Smith-Oldwick escapes imprisonment and gets mixed up in fights with men and beasts--this long-suffering bastard is repeatedly mauled by lions--and maniacs fight over Kircher; Tarzan arrives to lead an escape with the help of that friendly lion and a black slave they liberate from the maniacs.  The novel's action climaxes with a ferocious fight in the wasteland between our heroes and their pursuers; the battle is resolved in the favor of the sane when a company of British infantry searching for Smith-Oldwick arrives to gun down the maniacs.  The emotional climax of the novel is the revelation that Bertha Kircher is a British double agent in deep deep cover, one Patricia Canby; Canby has evidence indicating that Jane Clayton, Lady Greystoke, was not murdered by the Germans after all--the evil Bosche captured Jane and put her rings on the hand of a black woman whose body they burned beyond recognition in order to fool Tarzan.  Diabolical!

Tarzan the Untamed is a very good adventure story and I am giving it an enthusiastic thumbs up.  The fight scenes are good, the violence thrilling and cathartic--I've mentioned the spy's running over mutinous native troops with a plane, and another good example of climactic violence that serves as a satisfying payoff for earlier groundwork laid by Burroughs is when Tarzan unleashes his first lion friend lion in a German trench following a long discussion of how Lord Greystoke has trained the beast.  I've also already mentioned how much the book relies on Tarzan's relationships and changing psychology to keep it interesting.

An interesting facet of the novel, linked to these two successful elements--the fighting and Tarzan's psychology--is how, it seemed to me, Tarzan is not quite as invincible as he has appeared in some earlier books.  I feel like Burroughs has dialed back Tarzan's abilities as a fighter a little here; I recall Tarzan killing hordes of lions and panthers singlehanded in earlier novels, but this time around Tarzan is much warier about getting into scraps with great cats, and when he does, he welcomes the aid of the novel's two friendly lions and of Kircher, who is right in there, stabbing and shooting people and animals.  This makes the novel a little more believable and a little more exciting.

It was also interesting to read a classic Burroughs text so soon after reading three of Lin Carter's Thongor novels.  It was easy to spot Carter's models for various elements, scenes and themes, and to see how far short Carter falls of the standard set by the master.  For example, in Tarzan the Untamed, Burroughs provides a detailed description of how Tarzan captures, trains, and employs a lion in his and the British Empire's struggle against Germany.  Carter in Thongor Against the Gods has Thongor capture and train a ceratopsian dinosaur, but whereas Burroughs's sequence is compelling, the lion has a relationship with Tarzan and the lion plays a role in the plot and offers the opportunity for thrilling episodes of violence, the passages about the dinosaur in Carter's book are tedious and make no sense and the dinosaur has no effect on the plot whatsoever.

A good reading experience--I'm looking forward to the eighth Tarzan book, Tarzan the Terrible, which promises us some dinosaur action!