Rick Ouston's Personal Take On Choice Of Death
Friday, August 22, 2014
August 22, 2014 11:15
Writing to deadline
Yes, it’s good to see
Ouston’s byline.
Mac
Nobody is an expert on
dying except perhaps those who administer to the dying or soldiers in battle
whose companions die. The rest of us by definition must be amateurs.
In Spanish we have the
expression “donde el rey va solo” or that place where the king goes and is
alone. This is a polite 19th century Spanish euphemism for saying
that someone is in the bathroom.
Not too long ago while
driving on a back alley near Quebec
and First Avenue I watched a seagull thrash on the
ground in what must have been its last moments. For a long time we talked about
that place the elephants go to die and sometimes we asked ourselves where it
was sea gulls died, at sea or on land? I felt melancholic
watching the bird and well knowing that dying is something that is supremely
lonely and shared with nobody in spite of Hollywood bed-bound death scenes.
Five years ago I went
to visit a dying friend, architect Abraham Rogatnick. We had discussed death
many times but this time I had brought with me my copy of the stories of
Ambrose Bierce. I told Rogatnick I was going to read him Parker Adderson Philosopher. The story relates how a captured Union spy is not afraid of death
knowing he will die in the morning. When the Confederate officer changes the
execution to that moment and not in the morning the spy suddenly is afraid.
I asked Rogatnick if
he were to have a gun pointed to his temple would he be afraid of dying. We
both agreed that there was not way of knowing until it happened.
A few days later
Rogatnick died in his sleep. He had decided, a year before, not to proceed with
the extended therapy to treat his prostate cancer. He sold or gave away his
stuff and donated money to his favourite art organizations. To me he gave me a
Leica IIIF and a Mexican papier-mâché skeleton. His words to me were, “I am
going to die in a year so you can have my skeleton.”
Paradoxically today I
was hit by a wave of melancholia and delight upon seeing the byline of Rick
Ouston in the Vancouver
Sun.
Years ago, in the mid
80s Malcolm Parry as editor of Vancouver Magazine, had an open-door policy in
his office. Actors, politicians, thugs, prostitutes, writers, doctors,
architects, poets, crazy Estonians, illustrators, etc were quickly ushered in
and Parry always had an ear for good stories. He had a pulse for our city. The
magazine, Vancouver Magazine was relevant. In many ways so were our two city
newspapers. Every once in a while Parry would hire someone close to the
Vancouver Sun or working there to write a report on the status of our city’s
journalism.
One frequent writer of
those essays was Rick Ouston. I never spoke much to him. But I remember that he
had a look through his eyeglasses that seemed to penetrate into my soul. He was
quiet-spoken. His essays were good. Had they not Parry would not have hired him
again.
Years after when I
visited the Vancouver
Sun newsroom I would run into Ouston. I remember one time when I was there to
see Editor-in-Chief John Cruickshank. I met up with Ouston at the door (they had
to buzz it to get in). Ouston looked haggard and serious. In those days I used
to say to some of my friends that if you put Ouston into a room with my friend
journalist Mark Budgen and illustrator/designer Ian Bateson that in short
order, these three men would do themselves in. I thought it was interesting to
figure out who would have been first.
With all the changes
in the Vancouver
Sun, I stopped seeing Ouston’s byline. I called him one day and he told me he
was in charge of something called or similar to ombudsman of on line media.
Perhaps that was not exactly the term but it was vague. It seemed that Ouston
was in some sort of limbo and I was saddened to hear this.
Years back when a
couple of writers had been nominated for writing awards by the Western Magazine
Award foundation there was a scandal that few new about. These two writers had
written stories in which they had interviewed people who had not been
interviewed and quoted quotes that had never been uttered. The publications in
question (to be fair they had published the letters of protest) had then been
(amazing!) submitted as entries to the Western Magazine Awards. Rick Ouston and
Adrian du Plessis worked in the background in a subtle kind of blackmail, “You
give these two guys a prize and we will come forward.” The writers did not win
anything and the possible journalistic scandal was avoided. I was in awe of the
two men who had sound ethical standards which I know now are not really part of
the mix in the era of citizen journalism.
Today’s Ouston essay Choice of Death is a Personal Thing is in the heels of the Gillian Bennett
suicide of a few days past. Ouston defends that suicide instigated by Bennett’s
awareness of the encroachment of Alzheimer’s disease. In fact Ouston defends
our personal choice of death when circumstances push against staying alive.
I have long maintained
that if ever diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or another dementia, I will take my own
life. My reasoning is personal and purely selfish: What’s the point in staying
alive if I can’t think? I am beholden to no one, no children of my own, no
needy parents, no debts.
Later in the essay he
describes his bungled suicide attempt a year ago.
I wish Ouston well and
I congratulate him for his courage in writing this timely essay. I also
congratulate his Editor-in-Chief for allowing the essay to run.
It was pleasant to see
Ouston’s byline in spite of the circumstances.
Flit, Buda, Vanitas & Helianthus annuum
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Most might not know
what Flit is or was. Few that do might suspect a connection with Helianthus
annuus and Buddha. But there is a connection of which I will happily expand
upon here via boyhood slingshots.
In the late 40s and
early 50s the miracle insecticide was dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT.
In my boyhood Buenos Aires
we called it by the brand name Flit and it came in a can with a plunger that we
simply called “el Flit”. We happily sprayed it on anything without any
compunction. But we were well aware that it was some sort of health hazard.
Because Buenos Aires is by the
Paraná River Delta and by the Río de La Plata we had monstrous mosquito
populations in our humid summers. The only way to fight off the plague
(mosquito screens were not available at the time) was with netting or, better
still with a Buda (Argentine brand name spelling) spiral. The spiral (green it
was) was carefully placed on a metal base that had a spike on which connected
with a hole in the inner spiral. This was placed on the night table (but on a
small dish) and lit. The fragrance of the Buda was not all unpleasant. I had a
scent that was a combination of medicinal and incense.
When I was 21 and
doing my military service in the Argentine Navy, the procedure was to use our
pillows and throw them on the ceiling to kill the mosquitoes before we lit our
Budas.
I was a good shot with
WWI vintage Mauser rifle and the .45 Ballester Molina pistol and I passed all
my Navy marksman tests with flying colours. Perhaps this was because I had been
adept at making (out of bicycle inner tires) slingshots and shooting them at
birds; to be precise, to shoot a bird. I did and killed one when I was around 8
and I remember giving the gorrión (Wren) a burial in my garden and I swore I
would never aim at a bird again.
Occasionally baby
wrens would fall from the trees and I would feed them with eyedroppers. They
invariably died.
One fall I lit a pile
of leaves in the back garden. Then I remembered. I cried out to my mother that
I had burned my turtle to death. My tortuguita liked to hibernate under leaves.
You might by now
suspect that I never hunted animals except once.
It was around 1988 and
I was a tenderfoot gardener in our home here in Kerrisdale. I was furious that
the garden squirrels would eat Rosemary’s expensive tulip bulbs. I decided to find
a final solution. This was a long barrelled replica .357 Magnum co2 pellet gun
I purchased at the 3 Vets sporting goods store. I decided I was going to give
the squirrels a sporting chance by aiming at them without my glasses. I would
surreptitiously open the kitchen door and no matter how silent I was I could
see the squirrels running for cover. But I did get one in mid air. It plummeted
to the ground but it was not dead. I gave the animal its coup de grace. I was
immediately propelled back to the same scene but with that wren back in Buenos Aires. When my
youngest daughter found out about my vicious act she informed me she would
report me to the SPCA the next time.
A few months later
someone broke into our house and stole our CDs and our stereo system and the
gun. At that point I mourned for the CDs and the stereo but I was glad the gun
was gone.
In those early years
of gardening I used toxic chemicals to kill our garden bugs. But little by little
as restrictions for their use began to take effect I resorted to spraying my
roses with the hose to get rid of aphids. I was keen at first in protecting my
hostas with slug bait but then resorted to using water mixed with ammonia which
killed the slugs and fertilized the plants at the same time. Now I just let the
slugs eat the hostas. There are fewer slugs, of course because I don’t water at
night and the increasing July/August drought in Vancouver takes care of most of them.
It would seem that at
this stage of my life when I am about to be 72 I am turning into a de facto/pseudo
Buddhist. When I find wasps in the kitchen I carefully catch them with a cup or
glass and transfer them outside. I feel guilty when I pour water down the drain
to flush down those nasty silverfish that I occasionally see in the bathroom
sinks.
 |
| Helianthus annuus August 21, 2014 |
At this time of the
year spiders build their webs across garden paths. I walk with a bamboo stick
so that the web might be broken but the spider left alive to build another one.
My guilt on killing
anything alive is not only for animals and insects. I grieve for my plants when
they die and I keep struggling rose bushes that others would turf into the
compost bin. I live on the hope that next year they might do well.
I draw the line with
weeds and I viciously excise them with my secateurs.
 |
| Vanitas, August 21 2014 |
One of our beautiful
miniature trees, a Robinia pseudoacacia ‘Twisty Baby’ died but from its roots
it had reverted to the much bigger plain Robinia pseudoacacia. A week ago it
was 7 feet high. I looked at Rosemary and we both knew that the tree could not
be in our garden. It had to go. So I cut it down. I feel bad about it. The tree
was fighting for its life by reverting to its origins. I had terminated that.
The only way I can
understand and accept death is in the death of annuals who give it all and then
die but without sowing their seeds for a next-year renewal. I have written
about my eldest daughter’s Lillooet sunflowers before here. I want to celebrate
their short-lived life by proudly showing them off in their prime and in their
decline. I particularly love to do this since I recently discovered the Dutch
17th century art movement called Vanitas of which I wrote about here. In one of the scans here you can see a flower at its best with another without
the bright yellow petals and in decline. Going to seed is not a decline, or is
it? That particular scan is my 21st century version of Vanitas.
Philip José Farmer, My Mother & Lord Greystoke
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
My mother like most
mothers was a defining influence in my life. Because she was a snob she made me one. I
began to read good books because of her example. She was the one who introduced
me to Dickens, Graham Greene, Frank G. Slaughter and the swashbuckler authors,
Lawrence Schoonover, and Rafael Sabatini. Because of her I discovered Eric Ambler,
Daphne Du Maurier, Thomas B. Costain, Ian Fleming, George McDonald Fraser's Flashman series and C.S. Forester's Hornblower. By 1956 I
had become a member of various monthly book clubs while I was in school in Austin, Texas.
It was here where our reading went back into her direction.
By 1958 I had ordered
from the Doubleday Book Club Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart and
introduced her to modern Gothic writers. It was that year that I discovered
Dashiell Hammett but my mother did not like him. In those late 50s I was
reading lots of science fiction in paperbacks. My mother smiled at this but did
not ask me to lend her any of them.
My mother died in 1973
but a year before she suddenly liked my Philip José Farmer books. I distinctly
remember her reading and enjoying the first two in Farmer’s Riverworld Series, To
Your Scattered Bodies Go and the Fabulous Riverboat.
I stopped reading
science fiction soon after. My desire to read it was resumed with William
Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984 and since then my personal stacks have had few additions
in that genre.
While putting a sense
of order into my book shelves I discovered Philip José Farmer’s The Book of Philip José Farmer which I must
have purchased at Sanborn’s in Mexico
City in 1973 for 14 pesos (the Dollar was at 12.50).
I looked into the book
and I smiled when I found on page 201 An Exclusive Interview with Lord
Greystoke. It’s a gem and thanks to how the internet works these days here it
is, below. I am sure my mother would have enjoyed it. We both used to listen to
Tarzán, el Rey de la Jungla on the radio in Buenos Aires. Interesting to me is that the article below appeared in Esquire, April 1972 and the illustration was by Jean-Paul Goude who had been hired on as art director for the magazine in 1968.
 |
| Illustration Jean-Paul Goude |
An Exclusive Interview
With Lord Greystoke
Philip José Farmer
A subgenre of
biographical literature is that which claims that certain people thought to be
fictional are, or were, very much living. Splendid examples of this are
Blakeney's Sir Percy Blakeney: Fact or Fiction? (a biography of the Scarlet
Pimpernel), Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and Nero Wolfe of
West Thirty-Fifth Street, Parkinson's The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower,
and the Flashman Papers (three volumes so far) by Fraser. In fact, some public
libraries stock these in the "B" or biography section. (The Blakeney
book is in the "B" section of the Peoria, Illinois,
public library.)
I've written two such
"lives": Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. (The
former is in the biography section of the Yuma City, California, Library.) I
plan to write biographies of The Shadow, Allan Quatermain, Fu Manchu,
d'Artagnan, Travis McGee, and a number of others. Fu Manchu, by the way, may
have been based on a real-life model, a Vietnamese named Hanoi Shan whose
operations in early twentieth-century France were every bit as sinister and
fantastic as Rohmer's creation. I was informed of this after I'd made the
statement in Tarzan Alive that Fu Manchu had no living counterpart.
This form of apologia
is a lot of fun and much hard work. It requires as much imagination as the
writing of science fiction but more discipline. Historical facts must not be
ignored. Baring-Gould, in writing his Holmes biography, had an enormous amount
of scholarship, articles published in The Baker Street Journal and other
periodicals, to draw upon. But he had not only to read all these but to study
them and make decisions. He found many conflicting theories, and he had to pick
the one that seemed most valid. In addition, where theories or speculations
were lacking, he had to generate his own. He had to explain discrepancies,
which are numerous in Watson's account of Holmes's life. And, I might add,
Burroughs, in his semifictional narratives of Greystoke's career, left many
discrepancies for the scholar to reconcile, if he could. There are also gaps in
the life of the hero which the biographer must fill in. And if the original
writer has neglected the hero's genealogy, the biographer must research this.
Sometimes, a biographer
makes a statement which he cannot substantiate. Thus, Baring- Gould said that
Holmes was a cousin of Professor Challenger. He has been much criticized by the
Sherlockian scholars for this because he presented no evidence from the Canon.
Fortunately, in my Tarzan Alive, I was able to validate the relationship. The
fact that Tarzan's mother was a Rutherford
gave me the clue needed to track down the cousinhood.
The following article
is part of my interview with "Lord Greystoke" and appeared in the
April, 1972, issue of Esquire under the title of "Tarzan Lives." It
was accompanied by a portrait of Greystoke, a photograph of a painting by
Jean-Paul Goude. The staff of Esquire went to great lengths and much trouble to
acquire this, for which they should be thanked. The report that Goude got the
commission to do the painting because he is a relative of Admiral Paul d'Arnot
of the French navy, Greystoke's closest friend, is being checked. It is said
that Goude, like Holmes, is a descendant of Antoine Vernet, father of four
famous French painters.
Editor's Note: For a
number of years Mr. Farmer, who recorded the following interview, has been
engaged in writing a definitive biography of the man Edgar Rice Burroughs
called Tarzan of the Apes. Mr. Farmer's book, Tarzan Alive, to be published by
Doubleday in April of this year, is similar in method to Baring-Gould's
Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street
and Parkinson's The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower, with the very
important difference that Mr. Farmer firmly avers that "Lord
Greystoke" or "Tarzan" is really alive. In fact, Mr. Farmer was
able to track his subject to earth in a hotel in Libreville,
Gabon, on the coast of
Western Africa just above the equator, where
he was granted this interview. "I met him," Mr. Farmer tells us,
"in his hotel room --fittingly enough, on September 1, Edgar Rice
Burroughs' birthday. He is six feet three and, I suppose, about two hundred
forty pounds. I did not have the opportunity to see him in action, of course,
but just from the way he moved about the room I could guess at his immense
physical strength. As Burroughs said, he is much more like Apollo than
Hercules; his power lies in the quality not the quantity of his muscles. I
don't hesitate to admit that I was awed. I was concerned, of course, that after
all my research I might still have been the victim of a hoax; but from the
moment I knocked on the door and heard that deep, rich voice say 'Enter,' I
knew I had the right man. And of course I was even more convinced when I saw him
move --like a leopard, like water falling." The text of Mr. Farmer's
interview follows.
TARZAN: How do you do,
Mr. Farmer.
FARMER: How do you do,
Your Grace.
T: If you don't mind,
Mr. Farmer, I should prefer simply to be called John Clayton. I own a good many
titles, both real and fictional, but John Clayton, is, as it were, my real
name. Though not my true identity, so to speak. As you apparently know. F:
Excuse me, sir -- Mr. Clayton. Mr. Clayton, you told me over the phone that you
would see me for fifteen minutes only, so I'd better work fast. I'll start
asking questions right now, if you don't mind? T: By all means. You don't have
a tape recorder on you, do you? No? Good. F: May I ask first, sir, why you were
kind enough to grant this interview? T: Mr. Farmer, my reasons are my own. But
I will say that I appreciate the very great efforts you have gone to in
researching the details of my life. It is very flattering to me, and I am not
entirely immune to that. Besides, you seem to have information about my family
that even I myself don't know. Your genealogical researches provoke my own
curiosity, which has always been ample. I may ask you a few questions myself.
F: Of course. First, though, may I ask how it happens that you seem to speak
English as you do, with more or less of an American accent? You speak as though
you came from Illinois,
which is my own home state. I seem to recall that on the phone you spoke --
well, as I imagine dukes speak, the educated British accent. T: I speak more or
less as I am spoken to. You will recall that English is not my first spoken
language -- though it was my first written language -- very unusual business,
that -- or even my first spoken European language. But the first
Englishspeaking country I visited was the United
States, Wisconsin
in particular, back in 1909. I was not quite twenty-one years old at the time.
So when English was fairly new to me, I had rather a large dose of American.
Nevertheless, in Britain
I do speak British. I have a gift for mimicry, I suppose you might call it, and
I conform pretty much to the dialect of my interlocutors. When I gave my first
and only speech in the House of Lords I did speak as dukes speak, or at least
as dukes think they speak. You seem nervous, by the way. Would you care for a
drink? I believe I will join you in a small Scotch.
F: Thank you. But I'm
surprised to find you a drinking man. I thought -T: That I was an abstainer?
For many years I was. In my early days among civilized people I not only saw
the results of excess but, I'm afraid, committed it myself. For many years I
abstained completely. However, I believe the rash impulses of youth are safely
behind me now. I can be abstemious without being teetotal. After all, I am -F:
You are eighty-two years old. When this interview is published, you will be
eighty-three. But I suppose as far as physical appearance is concerned, you
look about thirty-five. It must be true, then, that story about the grateful
witch doctor who gave you the immortality treatment -T: That was in 1912. I was
twenty-four then, so as you see I have apparently aged about ten years since.
The treatment merely slows down the aging process. Burroughs exaggerated its
effects slightly, as he often did. I'll be an old man by the time I'm a hundred
and fifty or so. F: I'd like to return to your physical condition. But since
you bring up Burroughs, and since Burroughs is the principal source of
information about your life and family -T: You would like to discuss the
accuracy of Burroughs? Go ahead. F: In Tarzan of the Apes, the first Tarzan
book, Burroughs says that in 1888 your mother, then pregnant, accompanied your
father on a secret mission to Africa for the
British government. They hired a small ship, but the crew mutinied and stranded
your parents on the coast of Africa. They were
left on the shores of Portuguese Angola at approximately ten degrees south
latitude, or about fifteen hundred miles north of Cape Town. But it seems to me that many of
the scenes in the book could not have taken place in Angola. T: That is correct.
Actually, my parents were marooned on the shore of this very country, Gabon, which was then part of French
Equatorial Africa. I was born about 190 miles south of here, in
what is now the Parc National du Petit Loango. Any researcher, I believe, could
have deduced that from the facts. There were gorillas in my natal territory,
but there are no gorillas south of the Congo,
and Angola extends far to
the south of the Congo.
Also, it was a French cruiser that landed near the same spot years later and
rescued the party of Professor Porter, including my wife-to-be Jane, but left
behind Lieutenant d'Arnot, my first civilized friend. Why would a French
warship be patrolling the shores of Angola, a Portuguese possession? F:
Nor are there any lions, zebras, or rhinoceroses in the Gabonese rain forests.
What about the lioness whose neck Burroughs said you broke with a full nelson
when she was trying to get into your parents' cabin after Jane? T: The lioness
was actually a leopard. It was about the size of a small lioness, one of the
big leopards that the natives call injogu. I did break its neck. As you know, I
had independently invented the full nelson a few months before when I fought
the big mangani ape that Burroughs calls Terkoz. F: Well, then, how do you
explain the discrepancies between Burroughs and the facts? T: Mr. Farmer, the
relationship between my life and Burroughs' narration of my life is exceedingly
complex. I don't choose, for various reasons, to tell you all that I know about
Burroughs' methods or my own; but I can tell you a number of his motives, some
of which you may have figured out for yourself. First of all, Burroughs was
essentially a romancer. He was not obligated to stick to the facts, and even if
I had chosen to try to compel him, litigation would have been involved, and I
would have had to appear in court and submit to questioning, which I would
rather not have done. I entirely appreciate the feelings of your own Mr. Howard
Hughes in this regard. In fact, after Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes, I
communicated with him, and I told him he should continue to make the narratives
highly romantic, even fantastic. Jane advised that, because she said that if
people found out I was not a fictional character, I would never again have a moment
of privacy. In the second place, Burroughs himself was not always fully
informed. He first heard of me in the winter of 1911. I had then been known to
the civilized world for only perhaps two years, and the records of my existence
-- including my father's diary, which he kept until his death in Africa -- were
then in England. By the way, here are some photostats of that diary. You may
examine them, but you may not take them with you. In any case, Burroughs had
not been to England, much
less to Africa, and had his information by
word of mouth at several removes. In many cases he had to fill in gaps by sheer
guesswork, some of which is accurate, some not. For the sake of verisimilitude,
Burroughs pretended to be much closer to his sources than was in fact the case.
Finally, certain facts
are disguised in the books because they are best left disguised. Burroughs
gives directions for getting to the lost city of Opar, with its spires and domes and vaults of
gold and jewels. But those directions will lead the curious nowhere. Not that
it matters so much in that case, because I have long since disguised the ruins
of Opar completely. You could go there today and never know you were there. But
I hope you won't try.
A few of Burroughs'
stories are pure fiction. In Jungle Tales of Tarzan, I am supposed to have shot
arrows into the sky in an effort to stop an eclipse of the moon. But the story
happens in 1908, and in fact there was no such eclipse visible from my part of Africa that year. Sheer fabrication.
F: I see from your
father's diary that he delivered you himself, though he had nothing but some
medical books to go by. You were born a few minutes after midnight of November
22, 1888. On the cusp of Sagittarius and Scorpio. Scorpio the passionate and
Sagittarius the hunter. T: I know that. I have read much about astrology,
though I believe in it about as much as I do in the speeches of politicians.
Still, Sagittarius, the centaur with the bow, could not be a better symbol of
the half-animal, half-man that I have been. And I am a very good archer indeed.
And Scorpios are supposed to be ingenious, creative, true friends, and
dangerous enemies, all of which I am. We're also supposed to exude sexual
power. Hmm. F: Burroughs gives many instances of women attempting to seduce
you. You are certainly not the inarticulate ape-man of the movies. What you say
about being a good archer, however, reminds me of some critics who maintain you
could not have accomplished this. They refer to Marshall McLuhan's thesis that
only literate peoples can produce excellent marksmen. T: I've read The
Mechanical Bride and Understanding Media. McLuhan forgets the medieval English
bowman, who was certainly illiterate but undoubtedly a great marksman. And the
critics forget that I taught myself to read and write English. I was not
illiterate, though I couldn't speak the language. F: What do you think of the
Tarzan movies? T: I saw the first one in 1920, the one with Elmo Lincoln. I
came very near to leaping up onto the stage and tearing the picture apart. That
fake jungle, those doped- up, scraggly circus cats! Lincoln was built more like a gorilla than
like me, and he wore a headband, which I have never done. All that swinging on
a vine is movie invention as well, as is Cheetah the chimpanzee. Nowhere even
in Burroughs will you find me swinging on vines, though it's true that he did
greatly exaggerate my tree- traveling abilities. I'm too heavy to go skipping
along the, ah, arboreal avenues like a monkey. And the chimpanzees would never
trust me because they identified me with the great apes who brought me up. We
-- that is, they -- used to eat chimps when they could catch them. But later on
I began to find the Tarzan movies more amusing than disgusting. Jane helped me
to learn to tolerate them. F: Arthur Koestler wrote an article claiming that
you couldn't have escaped being mentally retarded. He said there had been a few
authentic cases of children raised by baboons or wolves and then found by
humans. These were unable to master any language. Apparently, if the child
doesn't experience language before a certain age, it is forever incapable of
learning speech. T: Koestler must not have bothered to read the Tarzan books.
Otherwise he would have learned that the great apes did have a language. He should
have deduced, as many have, that the great apes, or mangani, were really
near-humans. Hominids, in fact. Remember what I said about the sketchy
information upon which Burroughs' early books were based? He supplied missing
data with imagination or even misinformation. He made up names. He put animals
in the Gabonese jungles that did not belong there. He described the mangani as
great apes. My father had thought they were apes, and so called them in his
diary. But my father was not a zoologist or a paleontologist. The mangani were
a very rare, nearly extinct -- even eighty years ago -- genus of hominids,
halfway between ape and man. They might have been a giant variety of
Australopithecus robustus. The fossil remains of this hominid have been found
by Leakey in East Africa, you know. The
mangani -- and I use Burroughs' word for them, since their own term is an
unpronounceable jawbreaker -- had crested skulls and massive jaws. They had
long arms and often used their knuckles to assist them in walking, but they had
manlike hips and leg bones. They could walk upright when they chose.
Burroughs later had
better information about his great apes. However, for the sake of consistency
he described them in the later novels as he had done earlier on. He slipped in
the sixth book, Jungle Tales of Tarzan, when he said they walked upright and
were manlike.
I can speak mangani
fluently, of course. But I can't pronounce it quite perfectly. The mangani oral
structure is different from man's, and many of their speech sounds have no
exact equivalent in human speech. So though I can speak English with any of
several accents, I always speak mangani with a human accent.
F: Did the big
mangani, Terkoz, really abduct Jane and try to rape her? And you killed him
with your father's hunting knife? T: Yes. And there you see, by the way,
another reason why the mangani should not be classified as apes. They are
capable of raping a human being, whereas a gorilla is not. I once read in the
memoirs of Trader Horn about a white trader who put a male gorilla in a cage
with a native girl. The gorilla did nothing but sulk in one corner while the
poor girl wept in the other. Horn said he shot the white man when he found out
about it. In any case, gorillas have forty-eight chromosomes, humans only forty-six,
so a gorilla-human hybrid is not possible. But Burroughs knew of instances of
offspring being born to a human and a mangani.
F: Albert Schweitzer
maintained that Trader Horn, aside from some trifling discrepancies, was
generally accurate. Did you know that Schweitzer built his house on the site of
Horn's trading post? T: Yes, at Adolinanongo, a little distance above Lambarene
on the Ogowe River. I know it well. There's a
Catholic mission there, founded in 1886. That's where Lieutenant d'Arnot and I
came out of the jungle on our trek to civilization. F: Would you care to
comment on how you taught yourself to read and write English? As far as I know
this is a unique intellectual feat, especially since you had never heard a word
of it spoken. T: I was about ten years old when I discovered how to unlock the
door to my parents' cabin, and there I found, as you have read in Burroughs, a
number of books, all of them perfectly meaningless to me, of course. But one of
them was a big illustrated children's alphabet book with pictures of bowmen and
the like, you know, and legends like "A is for Archer, who shoots with the
bow," that sort of thing. Finally it dawned on me that the writing had
something to do with the picture, and I spent I don't know how long puzzling it
out. When I was seventeen I could read a child's primer. I called the letters
"little bugs," or the mangani equivalent rather, and I knew how they
worked. One detail you may find rather amusing is this: I had to invent, and
did invent, my own manner of pronouncing the English words, which had nothing
to do of course with real English but was governed by the usages of mangani
grammar. Mangani has two genders, indicated by the prefixes bu for the
masculine and mu for the feminine. Now I supposed that the capital letters were
masculine, since they were bigger, and the rest feminine. And as children will
do when they know the alphabet but don't yet know how to read, I pronounced
each letter separately, using arbitrary syllables taken from mangani. Does this
seem terribly complicated? For example, I pronounced g as la; o as tu; and d as
mo. Now take the English word God; adding the prefixes, I pronounced it
Bulamutumumo. The equivalent in English would be he-g-she-o-she-d. Now that's
very cumbersome, of course, but it worked. I could read my father's books and
know what I was reading. I had no idea how to write my mangani name, but I had
seen a picture of a little white boy, which in Anglo-Mangani, I suppose you
might call it, is Bumudomutumuro, or He-she-b-she-o-she-y. That's what I called
myself.
F: Burroughs says that
when you discovered intruders had messed up the cabin, you printed a
threatening note to them. You signed it with your mangani name. How could you
do that if you didn't know how to write it in English? T: I didn't. I printed a
translation of my mangani name: White Skin. When Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the
Apes, he had no record of the exact text of the note. He made up the text, and
he did not care to take time out from the action to explain that I couldn't use
my mangani name. Remember he was first and last a storyteller. F: Your reading
must have given you some strange ideas about the outside world. You had no
proper references to give you a full comprehension of the books. T: My ideas were
no stranger than the reality. My initial encounters with human beings were
extremely unpleasant. The first human being I ever saw had just murdered my
foster mother. To him she was an ape, but to me she was the most beautiful and
loving and lovable person in the world. The first time I saw white men, one was
murdering another. I am fortunate that that didn't make me shun mankind
forever. Otherwise I'd never have known human love. F: When you matured and
discovered that you were not an ape but a man, didn't you think of turning to
the native tribes for companionship? T: No. I hated them all for a long time,
because I blamed them for my foster mother's death. Also, they were cannibals,
and anybody not of their tribe was meat to them. And they had had unfortunate
experiences with white men. In addition to that, the women coated their bodies
and hair with rancid palm-nut oil. I have an unusually keen sense of smell, and
consequently they repelled me. Still, if Jane hadn't come along -
F: Burroughs portrays
you as free of racial prejudice. T: Like Mark Twain, I have only one prejudice.
That is against the human race. F: Let me not pursue that further. Many readers
have found your behavior with Jane when you were alone in the jungle incredibly
chivalrous. Burroughs attributes this to heredity, but no one today would
accept this explanation. T: Remember, I read all the novels -- Victorian
novels, mind you -- in my father's library. And I read Malory's book about King
Arthur and the knights and the fair ladies. I believed in chivalry quite
literally. And I was in love with Jane and did not want to offend her. Besides,
the mangani have a code of ethics, you know. They are not apes. They do not
copulate in public; they demand, though they do not always get, marital fidelity;
they punish rape with death, if the injured party wishes it. Consider all the
factors and you'll find my behavior credible enough. F: You became chief of a
black tribe which Burroughs called the Waziri. Are you aware that Robert Lewis
Taylor, in his biography of W. C. Fields, says that Fields once went with Tex
Rickard on a world tour? And that Fields entertained a tribe of naked Waziri?
That would have been in 1906 or 1907, several years before you encountered the
Waziri. Did your Waziri ever say anything about Fields? T: I have no comment on
that, I'm afraid. F: How much of Burroughs' Tarzan and the Lion Man is true? It
seems to me that Burroughs wrote it mainly to satirize Hollywood. T: Yes, nearly everything in that
book is fiction. But I did visit Hollywood
once, though I told no one except Burroughs who I was, of course. F: Did you
actually try out for the role of Tarzan in a movie? And were you rejected
because the producer said you weren't the type? T: No, though I wouldn't be
surprised if such a thing were to happen. In any case, I went there too late to
try out for the Weissmuller movie Tarzan the Ape Man, and too early for the
Buster Crabbe movie Tarzan the Fearless. I did meet Burroughs, secretly of
course. I liked him very much. He was gentle and broad-minded and he didn't
take himself or his works too seriously. He saw many things wrong in
civilization, many sickening things, and he satirized them in his books, you
know, but his mockery was Voltaire's, not Swift's. He was never soured or snarly.
But since we are now discussing authors, let me indulge my curiosity a moment.
I gather that you have been led to me by a fairly elaborate trail. Would you
mind explaining to me how you first caught my scent, as it were? F: I had long
suspected that Burroughs, Arthur Conan Doyle, and George Bernard Shaw had all
written stories about your family. Each, however, used more or less
sophisticated systems of code names for your various relatives. If these codes
could be cracked, and used as guides to the right places -- Burke's Peerage,
for instance -- they would lead me right to you. And as you see, they have. The
reasoning I have employed is long and complex, and I hope you'll be willing to
delay a full understanding until I can send you a copy of my book, since our
time today is short. Suffice it to say that I have shown you are closely
related to the men who were the living prototypes of Doc Savage, Nero Wolfe,
Bulldog Drummond, Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Leopold Bloom, and
Richard Wentworth (also known as G-8, the Spider, and the Shadow), and a number
of other notable characters in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction.
T: Indeed. F: I have
also found the explanation for the remarkable, almost superhuman powers
exhibited by yourself and many members of your family. As you know, a monument
marks the spot where a meteorite hit Wold Newton, Yorkshire,
in 1795. It just so happened that three coaches were passing by when the
meteorite struck, and in them were the third Duke of Greystoke and his wife,
the rich gentleman Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley House and his wife Elizabeth
Bennet -- the heroine of Pride and Prejudice -- Sherlock Holmes's
great-grandparents, and a number of others. All the ladies were pregnant.
Everybody was exposed to the radiation from the meteorite, ionization
accompanies the fall of these, you know. And the radiation must have caused
favorable mutations in the party. Otherwise how do you explain the nova of
genetic splendor in the descendants of these people, including yourself? T: I
will not say that I am entirely convinced. Nevertheless yours is a very
probable theory. My own skeletal bones are half again as thick as normal, which
might well indicate that I am a mutant. Moreover, even before I received the
immortality treatment from the witch doctor, I was developing oddly, though I
had no one of my own race to compare myself with at the time. I was six feet
tall at eighteen years of age, and grew three more inches in the next two
years. I did not have to shave until I was twenty. I have never been ill or had
a toothache. So your mutation theory seems likely enough. And now, I'm afraid,
our interview is over. May I have the photostats back, please? F: My time's up?
But -T: I don't need a watch to know how many minutes have passed. Good-bye. I
won't be seeing you again. May I ask you to remain in this room a few minutes
and allow me to leave first? I have already checked out and shall soon be gone.
F: May I ask where you're going? T: To arrange a seemingly fatal accident. Too
many people are wondering why I look so young. One reason I gave you this
interview is that I'm disappearing. Your book won't help anyone find me. But I
hold you to your promise not to reveal my true identity for ten years. I'll be
living incognito with Jane in various countries under various names.
Occasionally I'll return to the jungle. There are still vast tracts in the rain
forests of Gabon
and the Ituri where the only men are a few pygmies. The rain forests may
disappear someday. But I think that the worldwide pollution is going to result
in a collapse of civilization and a drastic reduction of population. Perhaps
the forests will be spared after all, and many of the species now threatened
with extinction will come back. In any case, I intend to survive. If I don't,
well, death gets us sooner or later, and I won't be able to worry about its
being sooner if I'm dead. As I told you, I'll be old anyhow when I'm a hundred
and fifty. Send your book to my bankers in Zurich. Then, Mr. Farmer tells us, he left the
room and was gone.
(Author's note: For
security reasons, I stated in this interview that I met "Lord
Greystoke" in Africa. It's safe now to
reveal that the meeting actually took place in Chicago.)
