Wednesday, June 27, 2018

bond, burroughs, and militaraphilia (pt. 2)

(a follow-up to https://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2018/06/bond-burroughs-and-miltaraphilia.html)

What would you do if your first love, who taught you everything and against whom no other love has ever felt so intense and pure, turned out to be...
...an idiot?
You might spend the rest of your life NOT telling people about that first love.
Which may not be an altogether bad thing, but...
...welcome to my literary life.
The writer who taught me to be a reader, who inflamed a passion in me i'd never imagined, whom i thought i'd hold aloft for the rest of my life, has become a bit of a...
...dirty secret.
Not literally - i'd never avoid the topic if it came up. But since my teen years, i've almost never shared my reminisces of the amazing worlds of edgar rice burroughs in polite (or any) company.
I don't recall how my first burroughs came into my hands. It was one of the tarzan novels, maybe #7 or 8. When i'd read the last word, i'm sure i knew i wasn't done. There were twenty-seven others, all in print. I gobbled them up, stopping when i finished the penultimate (i decided i'd save the last one for the last year of my life). I can't remember whether i read my first non-tarzan burroughs, "A Princess of Mars", before i finished the tarzans. But i'm pretty sure that's when it became concretized that i would have to read everything he ever wrote. A quest i came damn close to consummating, consuming the Mars novels, the Venus novels, the Pellucidar novels, the Caspak novels...everything that was still in print, and a fair amount that wasn't. My hunger branched out to burroughs' genre stablemates - howard, norman...
I was fourteen when i read that first novel, and eighteen when i hit college and ran out of steam (but still figuring i'd finish the quest someday). Earlier this year, i was cleaning out my storage, and most of my burroughs books went to donation, but i took that last tarzan novel, and read it on the long bus ride home. It was surprisingly satisfying, and so easy to fall back under his narrative spell. Whatever else one can say about him, few have equaled the tightness and fluidity of his prose.
I'm not sure how old i was when i gave my first interior eye roll at my burroughs passion. My thirties? Of course, by my late teens i already had an awareness that he wasn't as sophisticated as the more "serious" sci fi to which i was graduating - heinlein, niven, clarke...but it wasn't until many years later that i'd processed the moral flaws inherent in the burroughs worldview. A touch of the bullshit macho "hemingway" code, with all the institutional violence and emotional negation that entails. A victorian, self-loathing prudery. Racist overtones, with the way whites were portrayed in comparison to the natives. Rampant speciesism, with many other animals portrayed as "evil" or disposable...this despite the ennobling of "natural" man, and a disparagement of "civilization". A disquieting sexism, with men the prime motivators and wimyn ineffective and overemotional (Though perhaps that charge is unfair, as he clearly took delight in writing an occasional dynamic, capable female character...the exceptions that proved the sexist rule, or stabs at a nascent feminism? It can be so hard to judge someone from an era gone by. Perhaps even the racist charge is unfair.)
Still, such joy i took in those books so scrupulously lined up on my teenage shelves. And the greater point is the literary universes that my burroughs passion opened up. There have been a handful of other writers whose discovery prompted a similar need to read EVERYTHING the writer wrote - o'neill, stoppard, vonnegut, dawkins...so if it hadn't been burroughs, would it have been some other writer? It's almost impossible to imagine that not happening, given my personality and the fertile ground that was my brain. Yet some people say they became serious readers long before thirteen. It's disquieting to think of myself as a lesser reader than i am, but who knows? Yet maybe even, had some other writer been the one to ignite my passion, might my moral growth might have raced ahead more quickly?
And perhaps there are ways in which burroughs changed me for the good? Made me a smidgen more romantic? Reinforced ever so slightly my sense of "me against the world"?
Whatever the case, my burroughs burst was clearly an alignment of innumerable psychological and cultural forces. It gave me joy, and profound escape from a world whose dysfunctionality i could only begin to imagine when i was thirteen.
So if you're ever tempted to say to some youth, "Stop reading that crap! Let me get you something GOOD", well...a more circumspect approach might serve them better. Offer your allegedly "better" book, but take joy in the fact that they're reading at all. Heck, in this day and age, can you even be certain that captain underpants isn't better for a child than dickens or bronte?
But yes - to this day, i know edgar rice a thousand times better than william s.
Ah, the shame...

(coming soon - pt. 3!)

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