The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (21 page)

In
The Call of the Wild,
a powerful California dog named Buck is stolen and shipped to the Klondike. He becomes the lead dog of a sledge team. However when his master is murdered, he runs off into the wilderness and establishes himself as the leader of a pack of wild wolves. Whether this should be taken as awful or as a triumph is not made explicit—but it must be guessed that most readers took the ending as a moment of liberation.

In the companion book,
White Fang,
the exact opposite story is presented, as though London were working through both sides in some formal debate. White Fang is a wolf-dog in the Yukon, another pack leader. But Indians brutalize him, and a white man, Beauty Smith, makes him into a killer dog. Finally, a nobler white man rescues him, recognizes his superior intelligence, and tames him with kindness. White Fang is then taken off to California, where he is so thoroughly domesticated that he nearly dies protecting his owner’s home and family from an escaped convict.

Is this a triumph? Perhaps all that should be said is that the earlier parts of the book where White Fang is wild and free feel more convincing than the sentimental ending with a recovering White Fang surrounded by his puppies.

London felt the impulse to embrace wildness and animality, but he could never accept them wholeheartedly. And the reason was his inability to let loose of the idea of the soul. The evidence is to be seen in London’s autobiographical novel
Martin Eden
(1909), the story of a popular writer who feels demeaned by the nature of his own success and ultimately commits suicide. Attached to the novel as an epigraph are these lines:

Let me live out my years in heat of blood! / Let me lie drunken with the dreamer’s wine! / Let me not see this soul-house built of mud / Go toppling to the dust a vacant shrine!
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London felt a need for civilization, that temple of the rational soul. And he hated it. He loved the purely animalistic, and he feared it. All these impulses can be seen working at once in one of London’s SF stories, the novelet “The Scarlet Plague” (1912).

In this story, a global epidemic in 2013 is imagined as wiping out most of mankind. The civilization that is destroyed is a cruel and repressive plutocracy not unlike that in Ignatius Donnelly’s
Caesar’s Column.
But the alternative that follows is a nearly subhuman savagery. The survivors of the plague instantly revert to barbarism and ignorance. Tame animals go wild and prey on one another. Rank weeds crowd out the “soft and tender”
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domesticated vegetation.

After scene upon scene of brutality and degradation, the last old man who remembers the previous state of things—a former University of California English professor—muses on the blessings of the civilized state and the possibility of its return:

The gunpowder will come. Nothing can stop it—the same old story over and over. Man will increase, and men will fight. The gunpowder will enable men to kill millions of men, and in this way only, by fire and blood, will a new civilization, in some remote day, be evolved. And of what profit will it be? Just as the old civilization passed, so will the new. It may take fifty thousand years to build, but nevertheless it will pass.

All things pass. Only remain cosmic force and matter, ever in flux. . . . Some will fight, some will rule, some will pray; and all the rest will toil and suffer sore while on their bleeding carcasses is reared again and yet again, without end, the amazing beauty and surpassing wonder of the civilized state.

It were just as well that I destroyed those cave-stored books—whether they remain or perish, all their old truths will be discovered, their old lies lived and handed down. What is the profit—
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London was never able to decide whether civilization was a surpassing wonder worth the price of fire and blood and fifty thousand years of effort, or whether it was a profitless futility. Was man better off without civilization? Should man surrender his soul and be an animal?

Because the problem of man, civilization, and the universe was so agonizing for him, London was able to present it with extraordinary clarity and passion. But he was helpless to resolve it. It was a knot that he couldn’t unravel. To give up being civilized in order to run with the wild wolf pack seemed both frightening and desirable. But to abandon civilization was to deny the soul—and London was not capable of doing that. The soul was too dear to him. It was his ace in the hole, his assurance of his own special superiority.

Ultimately, London was torn apart by his unanswerable questions. He became an alcoholic, and drug dependent. At last, in 1916, already a ruin of a man at the age of 40, he died of kidney failure. Or he committed suicide like his alter ego Martin Eden. The matter remains in question.

Even before he died, however, a new writer from Chicago had appeared on the scene who was heavily influenced by London, and whose stories held answers for London’s questions.
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This writer was Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first great SF innovator of the Twentieth Century.

Burroughs was born in late 1875, just four months before Jack London, but his writing career only began in the days of London’s decline. Burroughs’ first two stories,
Under the Moons of Mars
and
Tarzan of the Apes,
both appeared in 1912 in the pages of
All-Story,
a pulp magazine.

Burroughs was a writer it was possible to overlook. His stories were juvenile and implausible wish-fulfillments published in cheap magazines aimed at the new unsophisticated mass audience. He was an entertainer, a not altogether serious person. In those first two stories, however, Burroughs presented a new style of hero, a new attitude toward the universe, and a solution to the problem of man and civilization. He could not have done that if he hadn’t been writing for cheap sensationalistic magazines willing to accept almost any measure of implausibility in the name of novelty and entertainment.

In every way the two writers of the same age, London and Burroughs, make a striking contrast to each other. London, that elite writer, was a bastard child of the streets who desperately wanted to believe that he was special and different, that he had the soul of a prince. Burroughs, the pulp hack, was a pampered child of privilege who wanted just as much to be the kind of ordinary person for whom life was an adventure.

In fact, what Burroughs truly craved was a life like the one that London had been born to—but without its pains and frustrations. Burroughs had a restless, impulsive and enthusiastic nature, but he tended to drag his feet and then quit when faced with the prospect of hard and steady effort without reward.

Burroughs was the fourth son and youngest surviving child of a Union officer in the Civil War who had become a prosperous Chicago businessman. Two of Ed’s older brothers were graduates of Yale. Ed himself was sent to the elite prep school Andover and was briefly president of his class until he contrived to flunk out.

It was a continuing source of embarrassment to Burroughs that he had studied Latin and Greek in one school after another, but never been set to the study of ordinary English.

He finished his formal education in a boys’ military school in Michigan. The one thing that he learned there was to become an expert horseman.

After school, Burroughs made a number of gestures toward locating the romantic adventure he craved. He volunteered for the toughest post in the cavalry, but found life as a trooper in peacetime so unpleasant and unrewarding that he had to beg his father to pull strings and get him released from the army. For a time, he was a cowboy in Idaho, but the days of the frontier were over. He joined his brothers in a gold-mining scheme, but the business went broke. During the Spanish-American War, he attempted to volunteer for the Rough Riders, but Teddy Roosevelt turned him down, writing Burroughs that it was too far to bring him from Idaho.

At a time when Jack London had gone to Alaska and returned to make a name for himself in serious literary magazines, Burroughs was no more than a boy-man vainly mooning after dreams of high adventure. As late as 1906, when he was past 30, he was still making futile attempts to get taken on as a cavalry instructor in China.

Even after he got married, Burroughs was still unable to settle down. He bounced from job to job. He dropped out more often than H.G. Wells.

He worked for his father. He worked for his brothers. He was a railroad policeman, a timekeeper, a salesman, an accountant, an office manager, and over and over again an unsuccessful would-be businessman. He aimed for competence and efficiency, but he wasn’t competent or efficient. He aimed for quick riches, but he never made more than minimal money. He aimed to be a shrewd businessman, but his business schemes were always castles in air.

The best thing that can be said about the young Edgar Rice Burroughs was that he never lacked the courage to dump one line of pursuit and go off looking somewhere else for what he was missing in life.

In the summer of 1911, at the age of 35—when London was already a fading alcoholic pouring the unhappy profits of his success into boats that wouldn’t sail and houses that burned—Burroughs was a never-was, a self-made failure, a man who had never stuck at anything long enough to make his mark at it. He was a dreamer pretending to be a practical man.

But Burroughs did have a number of well-formed attitudes that were unusual for a romantic dreamer. He was a Darwinian. He had bought a copy of Darwin’s
The Descent of Man
in 1899 and kept it all his life. He did not merely bow to the concept of the survival of the fittest—he actively embraced it. He disliked civilization and idolized nature. Animals to him seemed nobler than humans.

Above all, he was a complete materialist. The soul was just another religious superstition to him, one more lie imposed on man to keep him in bondage.

That summer in 1911, sitting in the empty office of his latest venture, a failing pencil-sharpener business, Burroughs began to scratch a story in longhand on the back of old stationery. It was a wild romantic fantasy, a tale of an American soldier of fortune suddenly transported to another planet where he finds adventure and the love of a Martian princess.

What a strange and desperate flier that was for Burroughs to take! With children to feed and bills to pay and another business disaster on his hands, writing a fairytale such as this one was a ridiculous escape for him to indulge in. And Burroughs himself was none too confident of what he was doing. He attached the pseudonym Norman Bean to his manuscript to indicate that he was really a sound and sober citizen and not a mad dreamer.
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He sent the manuscript to
All-Story,
a pulp magazine published by Frank A. Munsey. The pulps, which flourished from just before the turn of the century until after the end of World War II, were story magazines with garish covers, printed on the cheapest grade of paper that would take ink. They were a form of popular entertainment, acceptable but not quite respectable. The pulps had something of the same reputation for thrills and violence enjoyed by the earlier dime novel, which they largely replaced.

All-Story
was far from the best-paying or the largest in circulation of the pre-World War I pulp magazines. But it was the target that Burroughs was aiming for, and he hit it.
All-Story
took his Martian yarn and serialized it from February to July 1912. It appeared as
Under the Moons of Mars,
the work of someone named Norman Bean.

So much for his pseudonym, which Burroughs thereafter dropped.

Under the Moons of Mars
—better known by its 1917 book title,
A Princess of Mars
—was a success with the readers of
All-Story.
It was the work of a brand-new writer, learning as he went, with no time to polish or revise. It was sometimes clumsy. And at times the language was formal and wooden, at variance with the action of the story. None of that really mattered, however. Burroughs’ story got a unique grip on the reader from the very outset and held onto his attention.

In part, this was a result of Burroughs’ hero, Captain John Carter of Virginia. After a brief preface in which Burroughs introduces his “Uncle Jack,”
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author of the manuscript, Carter’s own narrative of his adventures begins. His initial self-description is thoroughly mysterious. He says:

I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection.
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How intriguing!

However, both the plausible introduction of Carter by Burroughs-the-narrator—who “remembers” a visit by John Carter to Burroughs’ father’s home in Virginia before the Civil War (!)—and Carter’s own mysterious self-presentation remain undeveloped beyond their initial statement. We know nothing specific of Carter beyond the bare facts that he is “a typical southern gentleman of the highest type”
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and a soldier whose sword has been red in the service of three republics, an emperor, and several kings. We learn nothing that ties him more closely to his relatives in Virginia or to any particular government, country, war, cause or specific experience. Neither do we learn anything more about his strange lack of a childhood or his amazing failure to age. Neither Carter’s lightly sketched background nor his unique nature has any direct part to play in the plot of
A Princess of Mars.

They do, however, serve to set up a most unusual character. What we are ultimately left with is a human figure whom we may take to be heroic, but who carries no freight of past history, earthly ties, or ideology. John Carter is all potential. He is a blank slate. He is a person who may do or become anything.

John Carter’s true essential nature is that he is a neotenic anomaly. This goes beyond his outward appearance. Physically he may be a perpetual mature young man at the height of his powers, but mentally John Carter is even younger, a perpetual kid, with all of an adolescent’s flexibility and unfixedness. He says of himself: “I could pass anywhere for twenty-five to thirty years of age, and to be a great uncle always seemed the height of incongruity, for my thoughts and feelings were those of a boy.”
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