Books: Claptrap Classics

A curious thing happened to Edgar Rice Burroughs on the way to oblivion. When the 74-year-old novelist died in 1950, most of his 24 Tarzan books and ten Martian sagas were long out of print and far out of vogue. Then in 1961, a lady librarian in California removed a Tarzan book from the shelf on the grounds that the Ape Man and Jane were living in sin. Actually, as Burroughs went out of his way to establish in The Return of Tarzan, the two were properly married in the bush by Jane’s father, an ordained minister. But the nationwide newspaper publicity over Tarzan prompted paperback publishers to burrow into the Burroughs estate.

Genteel Voyeur. As it turned out, at least eight Tarzan titles and a galaxy of Marses (Burroughs habitually produced one of each yearly) were in the public domain—and what the public wanted. Tarzan and Mars books now sell more than 10 million copies a year, account for one-thirtieth of all U.S. paperback sales. Latest to be reissued: A Princess of Mars (1917) and A Fighting Man of Mars (1931).

Their author, as the Martian duo (Dover; $1.75) makes clear, was as much of a threat to public morality as a parlor aspidistra, which his prose style often resembles. A Burroughs hero is virile and all that, but he is first and last a gentleman, inclined more to genteel voyeurism than simian action. “She was as destitute of clothes as the Green Martians who accompanied her,” observes John Carter in A Princess of Mars. “Indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments, she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure.” Clean living was the ticket. In The Fighting Man of Mars, Burroughs relates, “Tul Axtar reached for his pistol and I for mine, but I have led a cleaner life than Tul Axtar had. My mind and muscles coordinate with greater celerity than those of one who has wasted his fiber in dissipation. Point blank I fired at his putrid heart. . .”

Anti-Intellectual Snob. For a man who flunked out of Andover and flopped at half a dozen business ventures before he turned to writing at 37, Burroughs found time to acquire a comprehensive set of prejudices. An anti-intellectual and a snob, he disapproved of any race but the white (the Red Martians are morally superior to the Green Martians because they have remote white ancestors) . He was suspicious of most white men as well, save for “natural aristocrats”—among whom are included “John Carter, gentleman of Virginia,” the hero of the Mars stories and, of course, Tarzan, who is really an English lord. The Continent was plain depraved. “A splendid young woman I had known in New York,” says one Burroughs hero, “had been head over heels in love with a chum of mine—a clean, manly chap—but she married a broken-down, disreputable old debauchee because he was a count in some dinky little European principality that was not even accorded a distinctive color by Rand McNally.”

Why 10 million paperback readers a year should beat a path to this convoluted claptrap is anyone’s guess. Perhaps, suggests Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, Burroughs appeals to a reader’s “primitive instincts.” A more likely explanation is that the books induce the same kind of “dreamless and refreshing sleep” that overtakes John Carter when he breathes the atmosphere of Mars.