Friday, June 26, 2020

THE READING RHEUM: THE MUCKER (1914), RETURN OF THE MUCKER (1916)





A year or so after writing TARZAN OF THE APES and its sequel, Edgar Rice Burroughs—perhaps not yet aware as to how much of a permanent blockbuster he had in his ape-man—wrote these two books. The basic structure of the MUCKER books was the same as those of the first two Tarzan tales. Hero grows to maturity in rough environment; meets a woman and falls in love; gives her up to a rival who belongs to the same class as the woman; goes through a series of adventures and then meets his beloved by chance, whereupon they’re united for good despite class differences.

Next to the Tarzan books, though, the Mucker books are set in a world much closer to our own. Billy Byrne, the “mucker” of the title, grows up in the concrete jungles of Chicago. He has no father to speak of and not until halfway through the book does ERB reveal that the mother who raised Byrne abused him until he was too big to take abuse any more. Byrne’s real mentors are the toughs of the Chicago slums, and thus he grows up committing petty crimes and despising the law and rich “swells.” There’s no “nature’s nobleman” in this character: Byrne cares nothing for fair play, being entirely willing to kick a man when he’s down. He’s been taught to admire only raw strength, and though he’s not a “superman” like Tarzan, he’s about as strong as a big man can be.

As with most ERB books, the hero gets propelled from one locale to another with uncanny rapidity. Thus there’s no need to dwell on the specific circumstances that take the Mucker to sea, where he becomes tentatively allied to modern pirates. In the course of this new life of crime, though, he meets a beautiful upper-class woman, Barbara Harding. Despite her rarefied origins, though, Barbara tells Byrne what she thinks of him when he commits an egregious assault on a helpless man. This stymies Byrne, who’s used to women fleeing him in fear, and against his will he finds himself impressed with the young woman’s courage. Nor is Barbara’s courage limited to words. Whereas Jane Porter often seems like a milksop, Barbara defends herself against a potential rapist by stealing his knife and stabbing him with it. She also fights, to the best of her ability, at Byrne’s side when the two of them are faced with a horde of Malay Islanders descended from a clan of exiled Japanese. (These polyglot Asians comprise the only metaphenomenal element in either of the two books.)

To be sure, though ERB writes more realistically about Byrne than he did about most of his protagonists, he surely knew that his audience wouldn’t tolerate him alluding to Byrne’s past sexual history. Yet, ERB does rise to the occasion, so to speak, when Byrne, having fallen inextricably in love with Barbara, finds himself alone with Barbara on their primitive island. That he resists the impulse to rape his beloved is not a surprise in the end, but that ERB presents the situation at all is certainly noteworthy.



Sadly, the sequel is not nearly filled with as many pulpish thrills as the first novel. Byrne, having nobly told Barbara to marry a man of her own class, promptly gets put in jail, breaks free, and makes friends on the road with an intellectual hobo named Bridge. Then he and Bridge wander down to Mexico, where they have quasi-western exploits during the rise of Pancho Villa. Byrne fights a lot of guys, meets Barbara again, and has a happy ending.

In both novels ERB makes no bones about allowing his character to use insulting terms in reference to other ethnicities. To an extent this may be mitigated by the fact that most of the people receiving the insults are unremittingly hostile toward white people, though the second novel has a smattering of “good Mexicans.” Still, though the author doesn’t censor his protagonist, he does make fun of the mucker’s limitations. In one scene, Byrne and Bridge are speaking to a friendly Mexican who does not speak English, any more than Byrne speaks Spanish. Byrne refers to the Mexican as a “dago,” and when Bridge tells the mucker that the other fellow is not of Italian descent, Byrne complains, “So whoever said he was an Eyetalian?”



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