Ooze, Blobs, Jellies, & Slime in Weird Fiction

By the late nineteenth century, then, there seems to have been an image or awareness of the ooze and slime that lay at the bottom of the world's oceans. If the 1890s were the beginnings of our current popular culture, then maybe ooze made its debut in genre fiction during that same decade. I can't say that that's true, but I have an example, Rudyard Kipling's short story "A Matter of Fact," from People magazine, 1892, and collected in Many Inventions in 1893.

"A Matter of Fact" is more than just one thing. It's a sea story, a weird tale, an early example of cryptozoological fiction, and a story about journalists and journalism. In that way, "A Matter of Fact" might be a little metafictional, just as is "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. Kipling's story falls into two parts. The first takes place at sea, in the kind of isolation necessary for a weird narrative to play out. The second part is set on sober land. The seagoing part of "A Matter of Fact" is exciting, suspenseful, and filled with sensations of awe and terror. You can almost believe that Kipling really did witness the death of a sea serpent caused by the eruption of an undersea volcano. The landed part consists mainly of conversations among the three journalists who were witnesses to this event. That part of the story is ironic and a little humorous. If you're an American, prepare to be poked a little.

There is both ooze and slime in "A Matter of Fact":

The gray ooze of the undermost sea lay in the monstrous wrinkles of the back, and poured away in sluices. [. . .] Then the death-struggle began, with crampings and twistings and jerkings of the white bulk to and fro, till our little steamer rolled again, and each gray wave coated her plates with the gray slime.

* * *

In July 1917, twenty-six-year-old H.P. Lovecraft wrote "Dagon," one of his first published short stories. It's the tale of a man who, having escaped in a boat from German sea-raiders, finds himself on what can only be an upthrust stretch of seabed:

When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away. [. . .] There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.

There's a lot of namedropping in "Dagon." In the space of a couple of thousand words, Lovecraft invoked Gustave Doré, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton and alluded to John Milton. There's a lot of word-dropping, too. For example:

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

And: 

Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.

And:

Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.

My advice to young (and sometimes middle-aged) Lovecraft: try. Please just try.

Namedropping is not storytelling. (Nor is it analysis or criticism.) Word-dropping is also not storytelling. Words can sometimes act as talismans. They may have magical power in them. But certain kinds of words and phrases are not suitable substitutes for real description and real expression. What, for example, is "the fathomless chaos of eternal night"? If you compare "Dagon"--an early work to be sure--to "A Matter of Fact" you can easily see that Lovecraft could have learned a thing or two by reading Kipling.

"Dagon" was first published in The Vagrant #11 in November 1919. It was reprinted in Weird Tales in October 1923, Lovecraft's first story in "The Unique Magazine." It was reprinted again in January 1936 and November 1951. Call it a dry run--or maybe a wet, slimy run--for "The Call of Cthulhu."

* * *

"The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft is from 1926 and was published in Weird Tales in February 1928. It has slime:

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone [. . .].

There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults [. . .].

So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.

And ooze:

Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.

Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9′, W. Longitude 126° 43′ come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror--the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen.

The slime and ooze wasn't alive just yet. That would come soon enough.

* * *

Shoggoths

Lovecraft first described shoggoths in detail in his novella At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931 and published as a serial in Astounding Stories in February-March-April 1936. Shoggoths are plastic, protoplasmic, and amoeba-like. They make me think of the giant amoeba in "Ooze":

They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles; and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume; throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion.

 As works of the imagination, however, shoggoths seem to go farther back than that:

It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they [the Old Ones] first created earth-life--using available substances according to long-known methods. The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various cosmic enemies. They had done the same thing on other planets; having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community. These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the "shoggoths" in his frightful Necronomicon [. . .]. [Emphasis added.]

More explicitly:

The steady trend down the ages [Lovecraft wrote] was from water to land; a movement encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing the shoggoths upon which successful sea-life depended. With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost; so that the Old Ones had to depend on the moulding of forms already in existence. On land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but the shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem. [Emphasis added.]

So, like urschleim and Bathybius, like primordial slime and primordial ooze, first of pre-science, then of pseudoscience, shoggoths were created under the sea from nonliving matter. There are lots of oozy and slimy words attached to shoggoths, also lots of colloidal words. Lovecraft's descriptions of them make me think of fruitcake batter or those Jello salads that people used to make using mini marshmallows, Maraschino cherries, and mandarin orange slices.

* * *

Ubbo-Sathla in Clark Ashton Smith's story of the same name (Weird Tales, July 1933), isn't a shoggoth, but it has shoggoth-like qualities. In a kind of body-vision, a man named Tregardis travels back through the aeons to a time before time:

Through years and ages of the ophidian era it [i.e., his de-evolving body] returned, and was a thing that crawled in the ooze, that had not yet learned to think and dream and build. And the time came when there was no longer a continent, but only a vast, chaotic marsh, a sea of slime, without limit or horizon, that seethed with a blind writhing of amorphous vapors.
     There, in the gray beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing. About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the pre-mundane gods.

The image of a limitless sea of slime recalls the upthrust seabed in "Dagon." Moreover, as "a vast, chaotic marsh, a sea of slime," an oozy place in which life is generated, beginning with "amebic forms," it is an almost perfect evocation of the primordial ooze, primordial slime, primordial soup, or warm little pool of pre-science, pseudoscience, and unsupported or evidence-free "science" that we seem to have taken for granted for a very long time now. Tregardis' regression through evolutionary time had precedent in Otis Adelbert Kline's serial "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," which is also about a kind of ooze, slime, or plasm.

* * *

Shoggoths came back in "Notebook Found in an Deserted House" by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, May 1951):

I looked back at the big black thing that was a shoggoth. I looked back as it kep swelling and growing. I guess I told about how it could change shape, and how big it got.

It was real tall and all inky-black, without any particular shape except a lot of black ropes with ends like hoofs on it. I mean, it had a shape but it kep changing--all bulgy and squirming into different sizes. They was a lot of mouths all over the thing like puckered up leaves on branches.

That's as close as I can come. The mouths was like leaves and the whole thing was like a tree in the wind, a black tree with lots of branches trailing the ground, and a whole lot of roots ending in hoofs. And that green slime dribbling out of the mouths and down the legs was like sap!

Lovecraft didn't mention hooves, but if you're going to live on land, you might need them. Pseudopodia are good only in a liquid medium.

* * *

In "Slime" by Joseph Payne Brennan (Weird Tales, Mar. 1953), we have the fullest, clearest, and most detailed description yet of living ooze or living slime, including its origins. It's hard to believe that Brennan did not write his story in full awareness of the history of ooze and slime, including a possible reading of "Ooze." His story begins:

     It was a great gray-black hood of horror moving over the floor of the sea. It slid through the soft ooze like a monstrous mantle of slime obscenely animated with questing life. It was by turns viscid and fluid. At times it flattened out and flowed through the carpet of mud like an inky pool; occasionally it paused, seeming to shrink in upon itself, and reared up out of the ooze until it resembled an irregular cone or a gigantic hood. Although it possessed no eyes, it had a marvelously developed sense of touch, and it possessed a sensitivity to minute vibrations which was almost akin to telepathy. It was plastic, essentially shapeless. It could shoot out long tentacles, until it bore a resemblance to a nightmare squid or a huge starfish; it could retract itself into a round flattened disk, or squeeze into an irregular hunched shape so that it looked like a black boulder sunk on the bottom of the sea.
     It had prowled the black water endlessly. It had been formed when the earth and the seas were young; it was almost as old as the ocean itself. It moved through a night which had no beginning and no dissolution. The black sea basin where it lurked had been dark since the world began--an environment only a little less inimical than the stupendous gulfs of interplanetary space. 

Everything would have been fine for us surface-dwellers . . .

     Had it not been for a vast volcanic upheaval on the bottom of the ocean basin, the black horror would have crept out its entire existence on the silent sea ooze without ever manifesting its hideous powers to mankind.
     Fate, in the form of a violent subterranean explosion, covering huge areas of the ocean's floor, hurled it out of its black slime world and sent it spinning toward the surface.

So we have come full circle, beginning with Kipling's "A Matter of Fact," then on to Lovecraft's "Dagon" and "The Call of Cthulhu," finally to "Slime," for each involves a submarine disturbance of one kind or another that raises something from the ocean floor to the surface. (The dinosaur in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, released in 1953, is also awakened by a disturbance at sea.) Here's another full circle: Brennan's monster arrives on land in a swamp:

     Along with scattered ash, pumice and the puffed bodies of dead fish, the black horror was hurled toward a beach. The huge waves carried it more than a mile inland, far beyond the strip of sandy shore, and deposited it in the midst of a deep brackish swamp area.

And at last we have an overt example of sea-ooze, Brennan's slime monster, becoming the swamp monster of American popular culture.

Astounding Stories, February 1936. Cover story: "At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Cover art by Howard V. Brown. This was the first installment of Lovecraft's novella and depicts, I believe for the first time, a shoggoth, a colloidal kind of creature made from inorganic matter on the ocean floor, what Kipling referred to in his poem "The Deep-Sea Cables" as "the womb of the world." Like the giant amoeba in Anthony Rud's "Ooze," they escaped from their creators and captors to wreak havoc upon the world. After their experiences in Antarctica, these polar explorers are likely to become bipolar explorers.

By the way, the swamp creature on the cover of Beware #13 (Jan. 1953), which I showed the other day, looks a lot like Brown's shoggoth shown here.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Origins of Ooze-Part Three

Here's another long one, but just remember: we're going back billions of years here.

* * *

Primordial ooze, primordial slime, and primordial soup have become accepted terms and accepted concepts, even though they describe something that no one has ever observed in nature nor created or recreated in a laboratory. Like the ether of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these concepts are based on lots of assumptions, furthermore in the absence of any evidence or any real knowledge regarding a persistent and nagging scientific problem. In the case of ether, the problem involved the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space. In the case of primordial ooze, the problem has to do with the origins of life on earth. Nobody of a scientific mind seems to question the idea that life here originated in ooze. A belief in its existence would appear dogmatic.

So what are the origins of ooze? Well, the earliest use of the expression "primordial ooze" that I have found in American newspapers is from November 9, 1899, in reference to Sir John Murray's explorations of the ocean floor on board the HMS Challenger. (Sir John Murray, 1841-1914.) The article I found (in the first of its many appearances in stateside papers) is "Floor of the Sea" in the Washington, D.C., Beacon. In its original, the article was in the London Spectator and was written by F.T. Bullen. Bullen's article treats "primordial ooze" as if knowledge of the concept was common. Evidently, even in 1899, it had been around for a while. Murray is considered the father of oceanography. He has an octopus named after him, Cirrothauma murrayi, thus he has connections both to cephalopods and slime. If you're an oceanographer, you'll have that.

The earliest occurrence of "primordial slime" that I have found is in a review of a scientific article called "Bathybius and the Moneres" [sic] by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) in Popular Science Monthly, October 1877. The review, entitled simply "Periodicals," is in the Boston Evening Transcript, October 4, 1877, page 6. In it, reference is made to Haeckel's discovery of a "peculiar slimy substance" on the Mediterranean seafloor. Haeckel called this substance Bathybius or "The Primordial Slime of the Sea Depths." It was supposed to have been a substance that was giving rise, even in contemporary times, to life.

Mention of "Bathybius and the Moneres" leads to the article itself, entitled "Bathybius and the Moners." (I'm not sure which is the correct spelling, but even in Haeckel's article, "moneres" is the spelling used.) In that article, there is more talk of slime, ooze, Bathybius-ooze, and even amoebas. There is also an organism called Vampyrella, though I doubt it's the one with which we're familiar. Again, check the spelling.

The concept of Bathybius was older even than Haeckel's article. The stuff was supposed to have been brought up from the ocean floor during the deep-sea soundings made for the laying of the transatlantic cable in 1857. (Remember that part.) In 1868-1870, Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Haeckel went back and forth in some excitement to claim that Bathybius: a) was a type of protoplasm; b) covered the ocean floor; c) was constantly coming into being; and d) was a link between life and non-life. Scientists on board the Challenger blew lots of really big, Fearless Fosdick-sized holes in those claims. Huxley admitted his error in 1879. A poem in Punch from 1879 (see below) poked fun at the concept of Bathybius. Yet there were still people who believed in it or at least failed to question it.

To wit:

The earliest reference to "primordial soup" in an American newspaper that I have found is, surprisingly, from 1960. And guess who referred to it? Twenty-five-year-old Dr. Carl E. Sagan (1934-1996) of Yerkes Observatory, that's who! In "Life on Jupiter, Astronomer Says" (Oakland Tribune, May 11, 1960, page 11), journalist Tom Riley wrote of how Dr. Sagan had "suggested that a process of organic synthesis is going on over Jupiter's surface in much the same way as the primordial soup of earth evolved millions of years ago." Dr. Sagan famously said later that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So where was the proof of organic synthesis, either on Jupiter or on the primordial earth? To paraphrase a well-known bandito: Proof? We don't need no stinking proof! When it comes to the abiogenesis of life, the message is clear: We have faith! No evidence is needed!

By the way, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) studied biology under Thomas Huxley, and so maybe we have a line of descent for the concept of primordial ooze, from Huxley and Haeckel to Wells . . . thence to Anthony M. Rud? And from him, to lots of other creators of slime creatures, ooze monsters, and things that arise from muck, mire, and the swamplands of the earth? I can't say for sure, but I'm getting ahead of myself in any case.

In his article of October 1877, Ernst Haeckel wrote:

With this formless primordial organism of the simplest kind, which, occurring in thousands of millions, covers the sea-bottom with a living layer of slime, a new light seemed to be thrown upon one of the most difficult and most obscure problems of the history of creation--namely, the question of the origin of life upon the earth. With Bathybius, the ill-famed "Urschleim" (primordial slime) appeared to have been found, of which it had been prophetically affirmed, fifty years before, by Oken, that from it was sprung the whole world of organisms, and that this "Urschleim" itself had sprung from inorganic matter at the sea-bottom in the course of planetary development.

At last (I think) we have arrived at the origins of ooze. And they are evidently in the work of another German, a natural philosopher called Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), who wrote, in 1805:

[A]ll organic beings originate from and consist of vesicles or cells. These vesicles, when singly detached and regarded in their original process of production, are the infusorial mass or protoplasma (urschleim) whence all larger organisms fashion themselves or are evolved.

So, in the beginning there was urschleim, the first slime, the slime that is life and from which all life arises in the form of cells of protoplasm, which bind themselves to each other to form ever-higher forms through some unexplained process of genesis and evolution. And now here we are: we came out of slime, we are made of slime, and each of us carries within him or her an ocean floor, a tidal pool, a warm little pond, a swamp.

Thirteen years after Oken wrote came these words:

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. 

They're from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1797-1851).

* * *

From Oken to Huxley and Haeckel to H.G. Wells, ooze, blobs, jellies, and slime found their home in the oceans, either on the ocean floor or in tidal pools. "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud is set in the piney woods and swamplands of southern Alabama. In his account of what happened at Cranmer's lodge, Rud's narrator uses ooze and similar words to refer mostly to the remnants of the scientist's giant amoeba, which perished in the enclosure that he had constructed for it after it had eaten his son, daughter-in-law, and manservant. Those remnants now lie in a disgusting, fishy-smelling residue over the grounds. But at least once, that narrator also seems to use ooze in reference to the substrate of the surrounding swampland. So, questions arise:

• Was Rud aware of the concept of primordial ooze or primordial slime as a putative source of life on earth?

• Did he move primordial ooze or primordial slime from the oceans onto land, specifically to the swamplands of the American South?

• If so, was he the first to do so? In other words, was Rud's giant amoeba the first science-fictional, weird-fictional, or pseudo-scientific swamp monster--that is, a monster that arises from the swamp--in American popular culture?

We should be clear here that Cranmer's giant amoeba didn't make itself. It did not arise spontaneously from swamp-ooze. Instead, the author Rud replaced spontaneous generation with a pseudo-scientific or science-fictional process: the amoeba was created by a super-scientist in his laboratory using rearrangement of its chromosomes.

Cranmer didn't mean to do what he had done. "Mine is the crime of presumption," he wrote in his final notebook entry. He aimed too high and because of that fell far. His science was Frankensteinian, but he was not like Dr. Frankenstein. Rud's narrator writes that John Corliss Cranmer "believed in both God and humankind." In fact it was not he, the scientist, who brought on disaster but his son, the writer, who did it. The father understood fully the danger posed by the amoeba. He instructed his son to destroy it. The son, though, was more ambitious, and more than a little foolish. He believed at some level that nature can be controlled. There is a phenomenon in the world of today of sons who lack the moral, physical, and intellectual development of their fathers. We see that all of the time. It may be an irreversible trend. The loss of the first of John Corliss Cranmer's twin beliefs might be the best explanation for that.

One more convention appears in "Ooze," that of the widowed scientist, only this one has a beautiful daughter-in-law rather than daughter. This isn't exactly hopeful science fiction though--in this case it's more like fateful weird fiction--and so they all die.

* * *

"In the womb of the world," an illustration for Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Deep-Sea Cables" drawn by William Heath Robinson; from A Song of the English (1909). That looks like ooze to me.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a near contemporary of H.G. Wells. It's safe to say that Kipling was an entirely different kind of man and artist than was Wells. Like Wells and the men who preceded him, Kipling knew about ooze and slime and the deep sea except that he wrote about these things from a nonscientific viewpoint rather than a scientific one. I don't want to sound like Garrison Keillor, but here's a poem for today by Kipling:

"The Deep-Sea Cables" (1896)
By Rudyard Kipling

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar--
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world--here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat--
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth--
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"

"The wrecks dissolve above us," by Robinson.

Here's another:

"In the Matter of One Compass" (1892)
By Rudyard Kipling

WHEN, foot to wheel and back to wind,
The helmsman dare not look behind,
But hears beyond his compass-light,
The blind bow thunder through the night,
And, like a harpstring ere it snaps,
The rigging sing beneath the caps;
  Above the shriek of storm in sail
    Or rattle of the blocks blown free,
  Set for the peace beyond the gale,
    This song the Needle sings the Sea:

Oh, drunken Wave! Oh, driving Cloud!
  Rage of the Deep and sterile Rain,
By Love upheld, by God allowed,
  We go, but we return again!

When leagued about the 'wildered boat
The rainbow Jellies fill and float,
And, lilting where the laver lingers,
The Starfish trips on all her fingers;
Where, 'neath his myriad spines ashock,
The Sea-egg ripples down the rock,
An orange wonder dimly guessed
From darkness where the Cuttles rest,
Moored o'er the darker deeps that hide
The blind white Sea-snake and his bride,
Who, drowsing, nose the long-lost Ships
Let down through darkness to their lips--
Safe-swung above the glassy death,
Hear what the constant Needle saith:

Oh, lisping Reef! Oh, listless Cloud,
  In slumber on a pulseless main!
By Love upheld, by God allowed,
  We go, but we return again!

E'en so through Tropic and through Trade,
  Awed by the shadow of new skies,
As we shall watch old planets fade
  And mark the stranger stars arise,
So, surely, back through Sun and Cloud,
  So, surely, from the outward main
By Love recalled, by God allowed,
  Shall we return--return again!
  Yea, we return--return again!

The first poem is easier for me to understand than the second, but both have imagery of the ocean and its benthic regions: ooze, slime, jellies, cuttlefish, "the blind white Sea-snake," and so on. If we consider one or both of these poems to be genre works, then we have some early examples of ooze and slime in such works.

To be continued . . .

Cirrothauma murrayi, an octopus named for Sir John Murray.

Finally, "Bathybius," a poem from Punch, reprinted in British newspapers in 1879.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Six

Burroughs & Haggard

Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago on September 1, 1875, into an old and well-connected family in America. His father was a businessman and during the Civil War a brevet major in the Union Army. Burroughs the younger was related to at least seven signers of the Declaration of Independence, including John Adams. His two greatest literary creations, Lord Greystoke, better known as Tarzan of the Apes, and Captain John Carter, Warlord of Mars, were aristocrats of an old English or Southern type. If in reading all of this and more you were to conclude that Burroughs and his family were conservative, you would be right. His conservatism will come into play a little later in this series.

Although he grew up to be a man of action--he was actually beforehand a boy of action--Burroughs liked to read in his youth, and he possessed a vivid imagination. In that way and probably many others, he differed from his father. "My father was always very stern and military in our relationship," he wrote. "He used to tell me with increasing frequentness--until I was thirty-six--that I would always be a failure, and until I was thirty-six he was right." (1)

I'm not sure that there is a comprehensive record of what Burroughs read as a child or young man. We know that he read Roman mythology as well as The Jungle Books of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), for he admitted to being inspired or influenced--at least at some level--by those two sources in his creation of Tarzan. It's less certain that he read the works of H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925). I wonder, though, how could he not have? Haggard was one of the most popular and widely read authors of the nineteenth century. His novel She: A History of Adventure (1887) impressed, even astonished, reviewers and critics. It has never gone out of print and has sold in excess of 83 million copies since its initial publication. So did Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Lost Worlds on both Earth and Mars, read H. Rider Haggard, the great popularizer of that genre, or not?

In his biography The Big Swingers (1967), Robert W. Fenton made a case based on circumstantial evidence that Burroughs was indeed influenced by Haggard, particularly by She. (p. 62n) Haggard was a source of inspiration for Kipling. We know that much, for Kipling acknowledged in his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), that he had read and remembered Haggard's Nada the Lily (1892) before beginning his own Jungle Books (1894). So, first came Nada the Lily, then The Jungle Books, and finally, maybe, the creation of Tarzan. But is that a direct and irrefutable line of descent?

Robert W. Fenton made his case, but he wasn't the only one. Richard A. Lupoff did it, too, in Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (revised edition, 1968). The late Mr. Lupoff even included a family tree showing some of Tarzan's possible ancestors, and these include Nada the Lily. He went further in his speculations, though, in the process making another strong circumstantial case that Burroughs was influenced by Haggard. Both Fenton and Lupoff drew parallels between Haggard's She and two of Burroughs' Tarzan adventures, The Return of Tarzan (1913) and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916, 1918). (2) But neither was able to pull off a Perry Mason-like revelation in the courtroom of his own well-researched pages.

In 1975, Irwin Porges published a hefty tome called Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan. (3) His book is heavy on primary sources. In the preface is a photograph of Porges in a Raiders of the Lost Ark-like warehouse in Tarzana, packed to the ceiling with file boxes from Burroughs' long life and career. So you read for a while and then there it is, on page 130: in a letter to The Bristol Times (of Bristol, England), dated February 13, 1931, Burroughs wrote: "To Mr. Kipling as to Mr. Haggard I owe a debt of gratitude for having stimulated my youthful imagination and this I gladly acknowledge," adding, "but Mr. Wells I have never read and consequently his stories of Mars could not have influenced me in any way."

Interesting. My two-fold thesis is holding up. On one side are Utopia, Lost Worlds fantasy, H. Rider Haggard, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. On the other are Dystopia, science fiction, H.G. Wells, and myriad writers who came after him, including, perhaps, H.P. Lovecraft. The parts that don't seem to fit yet are also twofold: Utopia as an expression of a conservative worldview, and, conversely, Dystopia as an expression of progressivism. I might have those parts figured out, though, so stay tuned.

Anyway, there's one more thing to consider in regards to Burroughs and Haggard. She: A History of Adventure was published in book form in the United States in 1887, I think in June. (4) That summer, She was serialized in American newspapers. Towards the end of summer, on September 1, 1887, Edgar Rice Burroughs turned twelve years old. We think of twelve as the the Golden Age of Science Fiction, but before it was that, it must have been a Golden Age of Adventure, too. We can imagine a young Burroughs reading She, perhaps as he lay abed at night, thrilling at the adventure and romance of it and dreaming that he might have such adventures, too--that he might even one day himself become a writer.

To be continued . . . 

Notes
(1) Quoted in The Big Swingers: A Biography by Robert W. Fenton (1967), p. 11.
(2) See Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure by Richard A. Lupoff (New York: Ace Books, revised edition, 1968), pp. 225-229, 300-301.
(3) For more on Irwin Porges and his family, see my article "Who Was Arthur Pendragon?" from January 25, 2019, here.
(4) On May 28, 1887, the Chicago Tribune announced the publication of She for the following month. Burroughs was still living in Chicago at the time, with his parents. On July 3, 1890, when he was fourteen, his father shipped him off to his brothers' ranch in Idaho so that he might avoid getting caught up in an epidemic.

Here and below are a few illustrations of H. Rider Haggard's She that you might not have seen before. First, the cover of a British edition published by Hodder. I don't know the year or the artist. (Note the similarity between this cover and the cover of Les Baxter's movie-score album for Barbarian, here.)

Here's a comic book version from 1950 with cover art by Henry Carl Kiefer (1890-1957).

Here's another version for children, published by the Arthur Westbrook Company of Cleveland, Ohio. I don't know the year, but by the style of the art, I would guess this was pre-World War II, perhaps from the 1920s or '30s. I don't know the name of the artist here, either.

This is the cover for the Pyramid paperback edition of 1966. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database doesn't give an artist's name, but it kind of looks like the work of Bob Abbett (1926-2015).

Finally, another edition published by Hodder, this one from 1971 with a title character I assume made to look like Ursula Andress, star of the 1965 film version. Again, there isn't any credit given for the artist. I mentioned phallic imagery the other day. Here is an example of what you might call its vulvic counterpart.

Original text and captions copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley