THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1929)

 

SPOILERS (for a novel printed back in 1929, HAH)

Within two years in the early nineteen-teens, Edgar Rice Burroughs had authored what most of his fans regard as his three seminal serial concepts: TARZAN and JOHN CARTER OF MARS in 1912, and the PELLUCIDAR series, beginning with AT THE EARTH'S CORE, in 1914. Roughly fifteen years later, ERB then made an ambitious attempt to correlate all three concepts within a series of novels written from 1929 to 1930. Slightly later, he also provided a link to his "Venus" books, which are usually regarded as a concept distinctly inferior to the other three. This didn't happen until 1932, so it was probably just an afterthought for ERB.

AT THE EARTH'S CORE, like other books in the ERB canon, opens with the conceit that its narrative-- the story of how David Innes and his colleague Abner Perry found a huge primitive environment at the center of the earth-- is actually a true story related by Innes to Burroughs himself. However, for the crossover project ERB decided to create a fictional character, Jason Gridley, to serve as a linking element between his disparate fictional worlds. In two crossover novels, radio-technician Gridley is just an onlooker. First, in TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (the third in that series, and the first to center on a hero other than David Innes), Gridley uses his advanced radio to receive a transmission from Abner Perry, which tells the story of the titular Tanar and his adventure. Later, Gridley also receives a similar transmission from Mars, which allows him to relate the story of 1930's A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, the seventh of the "Mars" series, but there too Gridley merely relays information. 

The TANAR narrative ends with the revelation that Innes has been imprisoned by evildoers, so Gridley makes the promise to come to Innes' rescue. The story of the rescue-mission makes up the narrative of TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. Gridley seeks out Tarzan in his African jungle and convinces the ape-man to help save Innes, even though neither Gridley nor Tarzan has ever encountered the Pellucidaran adventurer. Tarzan uses his personal wealth and contacts with some characters from an earlier TARZAN novel to bring about the construction of a unique dirigible, with which the heroes plan to journey to the earth's core via a polar entranceway. Most of the technicians manning the dirigible are Germans, which may be ERB channeling memories of the German use of zeppelins in World War One. Tarzan also brings along a small group of his Waziri warriors and an American Negro cook (more on whom later).

Anyone hoping for a major encounter between two of ERB's creations, Tarzan and David Innes, is doomed to disappointment. Innes is not rescued until CORE's final pages, and the character rates only a couple of paragraphs-- which is more than we see for other Pellucidaran support-characters (including the aforementioned "Tanar"), who get the equivalent of footnotes. The only substantive crossover is the one between the hero Tarzan and the setting of Pellucidar. Since the latter is not the star of the Pellucidaran novels, CORE is in essence what I've called in this essay a "high-charisma crossover," since only one of the crossover-presences possesses centric stature. 

Gridley, though he debuts in a Pellucidar novel, is only weakly correlated with the Pellucidar mythos, and even less so with the Mars series. He's allowed to shine as a secondary, support-cast hero in CORE for reasons of romance. ERB always worked a romantic subplot into his adventure-stories, and since Tarzan like David Innes had already become "an old married man," Gridley was elected to play the role of the Earnest Young Man who completes a romance-arc with a comely savage girl of Pellucidar, the amply-named Jana, Red Flower of Zoram.

The structure of CORE amounts to a series of search-and-rescue missions. Both Tarzan and Gridley get separated from the crew of the dirigible, so that both are able to pursue distinct story-arcs. Tarzan gets stuck with the non-erotic duty of befriending some of Pellucidar's noble warriors-- a gorilla-man and the brother of Jana-- while Gridley saves the lissome Jana from both human and animal marauders. Love is swiftly kindled between Gridley and the primitive naif, but like one of ERB's earlier heroes, Billings of the 1918 PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT, the civilized Gridley becomes a trifle snobbish in the presence of the uneducated girl. Jana, possessing the full array of feminine intuitions, senses his diffidence and "catches him by running away." This strategy leads to more arduous treks and more battles with the denizens, animal and human, of Pellucidar. Thus both Gridley and Tarzan burn up most of the book's continuity until all the good-guy protagonists are united so as to bring about the anti-climactic rescue of David Innes and the plighting of troths between Gridley and Jana.

Gridley is little more than a stereotypical earnest adventurer, the image of the reader's identificatory figure. Jana is slightly more complex. Her fulsome nickname establishes both that she's beautiful and she knows it, but unlike many of ERB's savage heroines Jana can at least attempt to defend herself, using a spear to slay a primitive hyenadon, much like the character of Meriem in THE SON OF TARZAN. She's extremely proud and doesn't allow Gridley the luxury of pretending that they're "just friends," and her determination to make him confess his feelings in spite of his upbringing drives the romantic subplot. As for other characters, Tarzan is just Tarzan, though as in earlier novels he tends to shift into an animal-like affinity with the natural world whenever that suits ERB's purposes. The rest of the support-characters, good and bad, are all stock figures, though the Negro cook Robert Jones requires a little extra comment. It may be that the commercial reprint of CORE I read expunged some "pickaninny" humor, for Jones doesn't really do much in the story, though he does speak in the mushmouthed Southern dialect usually reserved for Negro characters. His backstory is curious. Though he was captured in Germany while serving as a cook for the American forces during World War One, Jones got along well enough with his captors that he never went back to America and simply continued working for German employers until being hired for the dirigible-adventure. The temptation is to believe that Jones is one of ERB's "cheerful Negroes," though at least he's never as pusillanimous as the maid Esmerelda from TARZAN OF THE APES. 

Yet just as Esmerelda was unfavorably contrasted with the noble Black Africans of the first Tarzan novel, it may be that Jones is meant to be an unfavorable contrast with the fighting Waziris on the expedition, who are clearly shown to be capable of learning the operation of the dirigible from the German crew. This interpretation would cohere with ERB's overall program of critiquing civilized life in contrast to the lives of noble savages, a prevailing theme in the majority of the author's works. CORE is full of such trenchant observations, most often lobbed against pampered Europeans, and even against the American Gridley and his circle of friends. Because Pellucidar is a place where the perception of time is somewhat erratic, ERB also scores some points against the workaday world experienced by his readers, the world of punching time-clocks and societal demands. 

Of course, it must be said that ERB's critique of modernity is a shallow one, rooted in the escapism of noble savages who are just wholly good or wholly bad. ERB actually seems less interested in the Pellucidaran people than in the multifarious prehistoric animals. ERB gives a lot of attention to describing all the exotic biological features of the fauna: cave-bears, pterodactyls, even a quasi-stegosaur capable of limited glider-flight. There are also a few animal-human hybrids, such as the aforementioned gorilla-men, the Sagoths, and reptile-men, the Horibs, the latter proving to be among ERB's best villains. ERB fills these descriptions with considerable verve and thus gives Tarzan one of his best settings for adventure.

On a minor note, the novel ends with one member of the dirigible-crew still missing, but this contrivance takes place simply to set up that character's own debut as a starring hero in the 1937 Pellucidar book BACK TO THE STONE AGE, also a very minor crossover since David Innes makes a token appearance therein. Gridley did not appear in this story, but he has another introductory role in the 1932 PIRATES OF VENUS, the first in the "Carson Napier of Venus" series. 

ERB didn't seem to pursue crossovers much after this period from 1929 to 1932. But TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE is certainly the best of his crossover works, as well as one of the best of the Tarzan novels.