{"id":28837,"date":"2012-04-16T13:00:06","date_gmt":"2012-04-16T17:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=28837"},"modified":"2012-04-16T16:17:57","modified_gmt":"2012-04-16T20:17:57","slug":"the-language-of-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/16\/the-language-of-men\/","title":{"rendered":"The Language of Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times <\/em>made its first mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs on June 14, 1914, when the paper\u2019s Book Review <\/em>included Tarzan of the Apes<\/em> among \u201cOne Hundred Books for Summer Reading.\u201d Having asked publishers to supply the hundred titles, the Review <\/em>editors did \u201cnot pretend to say what consideration has inspired each . . . particular selection\u201d\u2014a note of caution that veers toward alarm in the editors\u2019 capsule assessment of Burroughs\u2019s recent creation: \u201cThe author has evidently tried to see how far he could go without exceeding the limits of possibility.\u201d The plot description that followed made it clear that, \u201cpossibility\u201d aside, plausibility had certainly been breached:<\/p>\n

\n

Lord Greystoke and his wife are marooned on the African jungle coast, build a cabin, and become accustomed to the wild life there. A son is born and the mother dies. A herd of giant apes invade the cabin, kill Lord Greystoke, take away the child, and rear it as their own. When the child has become a man he possesses the habits, the language, and the great strength of the apes. One day a white woman is put ashore from a ship, and the ape man falls in love with her, and rescues her from many perils. He also plays the part of instructor to a scientific expedition. The scene then shifts to Wisconsin, where the heroine is rescued from more perils. Meanwhile the ape man has been educated in the culture of his kind, and he finally proves that he has a soul as well as superhuman strength.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Burroughs was surely unfazed by this. The mockingly neutral tone (and not terribly accurate summary) could hardly matter to a man who had failed at gold-dredging, accountancy, mail-order sales, and a host of other ventures by the time he was thirty-five and, close to desperation, decided he \u201ccould write stories just as entertaining and probably a lot more so\u201d than those he saw in the fiction magazines of his day. Burroughs\u2019s instincts quickly proved correct, and after selling a tale called \u201cUnder the Moons of Mars,\u201d he started composing Tarzan of the Apes<\/em>: \u201cI wrote it in longhand,\u201d he recalled years later, \u201con the backs of old letterheads and odd pieces of paper.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tarzan <\/em>was published in The All-Story <\/em>magazine for October 1912, just a few months after Americans had thrilled to Jim Thorpe\u2019s Olympic feats in Stockholm, and during the final weeks of Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s bumptious Bull Moose campaign to recapture the presidency. In May of 1898, in between some odd-jobbing and work as a ranch hand, Burroughs had applied for a spot in the Rough Riders and been turned down by Roosevelt himself. But surely no one could better exemplify what TR called \u201cthe strenuous life\u201d than Burroughs\u2019s new vine-swinging, lasso-waving, knife-wielding hero. In Tarzan of the Apes<\/em>, the author might not be displaying the tight craft of Conrad or the immediate social concerns of Dreiser, both of whom had books on that Summer 1914 list, but he was serving a brew of the wholesome and the exotic that appealed to the fantasy lives of both men and women, boys and girls\u2014precincts for the most part kept rigidly separated by writers of what we now call \u201cgenre fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the literary-minded reader spots Tarzan\u2019s kinship to the \u201cnoble savage\u201d who intrigued readers of a century before, the book\u2019s heroine, Jane Porter, sees something even rarer: \u201cWhat a perfect creature! There could be naught of cruelty or baseness beneath that godlike exterior. Never, she thought, had such a man strode the earth since God created the first in his own image.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time Jane makes this excited mental utterance, the reader has already seen, along with ample evidence of Tarzan\u2019s physical power, demonstrations of his cleverness, his humor, and\u2014for all his ability to snap a lion\u2019s neck\u2014a fundamental indifference to power. Tarzan is King of the Apes for a very brief period, because this human son of an English lord doesn\u2019t really enjoy lording it over anyone: \u201cTarzan tired of it as he found that kingship meant the curtailment of his liberty. He longed for the little cabin and the sun-kissed sea\u2014for the cool interior of the well-built house, and for the never-ending wonders of the many books.\u201d He is more a philosopher than a king. He also has a place in fiction\u2019s company of romantic renouncers, men who have always, from Dickens\u2019s Sydney Carton to Humphrey Bogart\u2019s Rick, elicited the sentimental appreciation of readers and moviegoers. When Tarzan gives up Jane at the end of the novel, so that she can make a more sensible (to say the least) marriage, the gesture confirms the \u201cnobility of character\u201d that Jane sees in him from the beginning.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Edgar Rice Burroughs's bookplate, designed by his nephew Studley Oldham Burroughs. Tarzan, holding the planet Mars, is accompanied by a host of characters from Burroughs's stories.<\/p><\/div>\n

Anyone who returns to Tarzan <\/em>after years of swinging through the higher branches of literature will have to acknowledge the book\u2019s falterings in plot and narration. On its first page Burroughs more or less promises to tell the tale through a series of filters that suggest Conrad\u2019s Marlow (\u201cI had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me\u201d) as well as via some document discoveries that seem meant to lend the kind of credibility such devices gave the earliest English novels. But these contrivances cease to be of any consequence, and the first-person narrator soon largely disappears\u2014except when the author needs to throw his hands up through a loophole: \u201cWith Tantor, the elephant, he [Tarzan] made friends. How? Ask me not.\u201d The storyteller makes a few startling and ingenious asides\u2014pointing out that Tarzan\u2019s aristocratic uncle is using a fingerbowl at his London club at the same moment his nephew is gobbling the flesh of a wild boar\u2014but such irony is neither Burroughs\u2019s strong suit nor his chief aim.<\/p>\n

He has, above all, a tale <\/em>to tell, and to get the job done he\u2019ll use a whole range of voices and styles, trying them out the way he tried all those occupations before authorship. We get the old-fashioned essayistic sound of omniscience (\u201csmiles are the foundation of beauty\u201d) as well as the plain carpentry of popular science and travel writing (\u201cIf you ever chance to pass that far off African village \u2026\u201d). The text carries grace notes of a light classicism (\u201cRoman gladiators\u201d and a \u201cGreek god\u201d cohabit within a paragraph of Chapter XIII) and there\u2019s an occasional echo of Dickens: Professor Porter\u2019s pedantic definition of a lion is almost a direct steal from Hard Times<\/em>\u2019s Mr. Gradgrind.<\/p>\n

And yet, Burroughs finally gets the job done on his own narrative terms. The author speeds through what he chooses (Tarzan\u2019s birth occurs almost incidentally) and saves shrewd, verve-filled renderings for what captures his own imagination. He knows how to end a chapter (\u201cand then he pulled the trigger\u201d) and to construct a camera-ready paragraph. The following description of Jane suggests an awareness of the cinematic storytelling mode just aborning, the adaptive medium that will bring Burroughs fame and riches beyond anything he dreamt of when beginning his longhand tale:<\/p>\n

\n

Jane Porter\u2014her 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\u2014watched the primordial ape battle with the primeval man for possession of a woman\u2014for her.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Cast into her brave new world, Jane is the novel\u2019s Miranda. Burroughs has repeated mutinies do the work of The Tempest <\/em>\u2019s banishment and shipwreck, and there are enough doublings and misapprehensions\u2014for a long stretch Jane and her suitor, Clayton, believe there must be two <\/em>creatures doing all that Tarzan does\u2014that a reader will sometimes think he\u2019s in the Forest of Arden instead of the jungle.<\/p>\n

Like the Shakespeare of The Tempest<\/em>, Burroughs is preoccupied with language. He may not deploy it with unfailing elegance, but he is in awe of its existence. Caliban finally rues his acquisition of speech from Prospero, but Tarzan reveres every word he gains through the effortful decoding of those inky \u201clittle bugs\u201d in what he didn\u2019t even know were books. For all his exaltation of Tarzan\u2019s animal prowess, Burroughs most lyrically cherishes the products of his mind: \u201cTarzan of the apes, little primitive man, presented a picture filled, at once, with pathos and with promise\u2014an allegorical figure of the primordial groping through the black night of ignorance toward the light of learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Able to read English before he can speak it, Tarzan may strain our credulity in the same way Burroughs\u2019s grammatical apes do, but he provokes our imagination. The allure of the primitive is of course a great part of the book\u2019s draw; but the novel also hymns the possibilities of civilization. Lieutenant D\u2019Arnot, one of the French officers searching for Jane after her abduction by the ape named Terkoz, ends up having to be rescued himself, and when he asks what repayment he can offer, Tarzan unhesitatingly says, \u201cTeach me to speak the language of men.\u201d With its opening dactyl and beautiful cadence, it\u2019s the most thrilling sentence in the book, a line that Shakespeare would have considered a good hour\u2019s work. Like so many literary heroes going back to Don Quixote, Tarzan is the sum of all he\u2019s read: \u201cHe would act as he imagined the men in the books would have acted were they in his place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In his way, Tarzan even seems a flying resolution of the mind\/body problem, a fantasy remedy for the anxieties about emasculation that would bother American readers from Edith Wharton\u2019s Ethan Frome <\/em>(1911) to Philip Wylie\u2019s Generation of Vipers <\/em>(1942). The year 1912 would force Americans to ponder the sinkability of the Titanic <\/em>and the discovery of Vitamins A and B, substances which, however natural, began to suggest that man might need a little more help and supplementing than he\u2019d hitherto believed. Swinging through the sky and descending to the rescue, Tarzan is perhaps the only deus ex machina who\u2019s ever been the protagonist too. He differs from what we now call \u201csuperheroes\u201d by the absence of any extra-human powers; he is what we already are, simply expanded toward perfection.<\/p>\n

There have been, of course\u2014in addition to all the print sequels\u2014the movie franchise, the comic strips, the town of Tarzana, the TV series, the Disney cartoon, and the video game. Each is further testament to the original novel\u2019s deep, subconscious appeal. \u201cTarzan swung himself to the trees once more, and with swift noiselessness sped along high above the trail\u201d: this is not the mechanized flight that readers of 1912 were hearing about and even beginning to experience; it is closer to the way we imagine ourselves flying when we\u2019re asleep. Moving fast, through the air, safe, worthy <\/em>of being rescued and held: it\u2019s the stuff of our deepest dreams, which were the subject of a ground-breaking new book by Dr. Henri Bergson in the summer of 1914. The Times <\/em>listed it five titles away from Tarzan of the Apes.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from Thomas Mallon<\/a>\u2019s introduction to the Library of America\u2019s new edition of <\/em>Tarzan of the Apes<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times made its first mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs on June 14, 1914, when the paper\u2019s Book Review included Tarzan of the Apes among \u201cOne Hundred Books for Summer Reading.\u201d Having asked publishers to supply the hundred titles, the Review editors did \u201cnot pretend to say what consideration has inspired each . […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":326,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[1203,2059,493,7001,7005,6082,7002,7008,7003,687,7006,7000,7004,3435,7007,2295],"class_list":["post-28837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-charles-dickens","tag-don-quixote","tag-dreams","tag-edgar-rice-burroughs","tag-edith-wharton","tag-ethan-frome","tag-genre-fiction","tag-henri-bergson","tag-joseph-conrad","tag-language","tag-philip-wylie","tag-tarzan","tag-the-tempest","tag-theodore-roosevelt","tag-titanic","tag-william-shakespeare"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Language of Men by Thomas Mallon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 16, 2012 \u2013 The New York Times made its first mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs on June 14, 1914, when the paper\u2019s Book Review included Tarzan of the 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