Ex-Post Burroughso

I've finished all of Burroughs's books, but I'm not finished with Burroughs...not by a long shot. For one thing, I'm still reading Burroughs out loud to Joe four nights a week. And for another, I've still got some "other stuff"--either about Burroughs or about his works or stories written by other people about Burroughs's characters. I just finished one of those "other" books: Brother Men: The Correspondence of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Herbert T. Weston, edited by Matt Cohen. 

It had some moments, for sure. The best of those moments being a narrative about Burroughs and some friends playing tennis while watching the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (He was living in Hawaii at the time, obviously...and he was very close to the bay while it was being bombed. Why he and some other people wanted to keep playing tennis while bombs were falling is beyond my capacity to comprehend, but there it is.) 

And at heart this was the story of ERB's friendship with Herbert Weston from December 30, 1903 (when the 28 year old Burroughs was working with his brothers at the Sweetser-Burroughs Mining Company in Idaho, and had no intention of being a writer) through December 7, 1945 (when Burroughs had less than four and one-half years left to live, and was struggling with massive health problems and not able to do much--if any--writing). 

The not so good aspects of this book primarily concerned the editor, Matt Cohen. I suspect that this book began (and perhaps ended) as a degree thesis, because the introduction is so full of high falutin shit that I almost had to put it aside. But I bulled my way through, and once I got to the actual letters, I only had to deal with two Cohen distractions: (1) his incredibly stupid footnotes, most of which were mis-timed, and many of which were just unnecessary, and (2) the fact that he did no editing whatsoever of the letters, so there was quite a bit of repetition, trivial stuff, etc. That last objection can be forgiven, of course, because who wants to chop away parts of ERB's writing, after all...but on the other hand, what the hell is an editor for?

ANYway...I'm not sorry to have read this book, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is not a real Burroughs enthusiast. You know, the kind of person who would read all 84 of his books and still want some more.