I've been reading John Taliaferro's Tarzan Forever, which is a biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Just here and there reading it, not focusing on it intensely, but it's a good read, so I've already finished 244 of its 383 pages (not counting the index, btw). This is my second biography of ERB. The first was Richard A. Lupoff's Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs...which I thought was interesting, but written with a shitty attitude--lots of sniping at ERB. And though I am rather fond of some of Mr. Lupoff's work...especially Space War Blues (and even more especially its original incarnation “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama,” which got inside of my head so hard that I wrote my second novel (senior year of high school, 1975--now resides in my closet--in its shadow) but also Into the Aether, All in Color For a Dime (which he co-edited with the great DonThompson), and Where Memory Hides: A Writer's Life...I have to say, "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." So where does Lupoff get the balls to throw turds at ERB? I don't know, but it marred my enjoyment of his book. And, alas, the same criticism must be applied to Mr. Taliaferro's biography.
And it's not that I don't want to hear negative things about a writer I admire. I'm a big boy, and I realize that my heroes all have feet of clay. Even Jesus got a little snippy with that Samaritan woman. And that fig tree incident? I mean, really.... But this goes way beyond that. There are times when Taliaferro just goes out of his way to say shitty things about ERB. For example...at one point he's talking about a little ditty that ERB came up with as a mini-paean to his new digs in Tarzana. After quoting five lines, Taliaferro says, "Now such lyrics only seemed mawkish and passé." I mean...seriously...it's not like this was one of Burroughs's major works, for fuck's sake. It was a little thing he composed for his own amusement. And this is by no means the only example of this kind of shitty sniping on the part of Taliaferro. It's not enough to make me stop reading the book, but it is enough to make me not like the writer very much.
Despite that, the book has been a good source of information on Burroughs's lesser known works. I have been carefully taking note of any titles that I don't recognize in the hope that I can track down works which have not been published in book form...and some works which have never been published. (After all, there is a very extensive collection of Burroughs material housed in the basement of the U of L library, and the man in charge there is a very nice fellow....) This morning I thought I was onto a new one when I read that Burroughs had written a short story entitled "That Damned Dude." I knew it was neither one of the 70.75 (halfway through Savage Pellucidar and one fourth of the way through The Mad King even as we speak) ERB books I've read so far, nor was it one of the twelve ERB books I have left to read (only 12! sigh)...so I got down to Googling.
It didn't take long to find out that this story was actually published as "The Terrible Tenderfoot"...and that it was eventually published in book form as The Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County, which I'd already read (and enjoyed immensely--I wish that ERB had written more Westerns, as all four of those he published were excellent). Though apparently the book form excised some of the text from the story publication, so that's kind of a pain in the ass. I don't often wish that I were a rich man, but if I were...one of the things I'd do would be to publish a Complete Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs which offered the full texts of every one of his works. Oh, and help the poor, too.
But in the course of my investigations, I ran across this bit of information from the ever excellent webzine.com:
"Collier's rejected the story. The story was also rejected by Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, Ladies Home Journal, Blue Book, Argosy (twice), College Humor, Short Stories. Five years later he re-submitted the manuscript to Liberty under the title "The Brass Heart" using the pseudonym John Mann. Liberty rejected it again. The story eventually saw print in Thrilling Adventures in 1940."
Keeping in mind that when he first tried to publish this story in 1930 he had already published over four dozen books, sold millions of copies of those books, and was at least one of the best-selling writers of his time...and add to all of that that this was a good story...and, well.. it just gives a vivid picture of what the publishing world was like. And of course it's much worse now.
Sigh.
You know, that doesn't make it any easier to get back to work of There Is No Mountain...but ahmo give it a try anyway. Maybe my reward will be in the next life.
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