Reviews for Fantasy voices

The average rating for Fantasy voices based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-11-08 00:00:00 John Morris I was in my time a good reader of the ERB corpus, and I believe the last book I read'before I sold off my collection of Tarzan, Mars, Venus, Pellucidar, and other miscellaneous ERB novels (well over 70 books, mostly paperback editions) four years later to have some cash for my first semester of college'was The Outlaw of Torn in 1968, on the flight that took my family from San Diego, California, to San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a two-year stint. I recall thinking that the Outlaw of Torn was okay, that it must've been written early in his career because the language was stiffer'even discounting the intentional archaicisms to mirror a medieval English setting'and the plot was simpler than the best of the Tarzan or Mars novels. I'd begun my five-year affair with ERB with Tanar of Pellucidar in an Ace paperback edition that featured a cover by Frank Frazetta. All through the mid- and late-1960s, Ballantine and Ace were churning out the ERB canon, and I was doing everything I could to keep up. What made me a good reader was that however similar the plots and devices, I appreciated the uniqueness of each novel and was never less than eager to move onto the next. When I purchased these two volumes of Porges' biography inexpensively on a trip to Scotland's designated book town, Wigtown, it was largely for the anticipated nostalgia. Plus the covers were sufficiently gaudy and sensational enough to draw my interest in a camp appreciation of early 20th-century pulp magazine illustration. What there was to know about Burroughs I couldn't imagine… What are the burning questions one would ask of a writer like Burroughs? As it turns out, Burroughs life was not all that interesting, and his personality sometimes prickly and overbearing. While largely a confident young man'with the physical prowess to justify a presence in the world'Burroughs' lack of material success made him diffident at age 38, and it was only after two years of writing and a series of magazine sales that he decided to become a full-time writer. As to artistic wellsprings, Porges can offer little more than Burroughs' own words, which unfortunately say little about the genesis of his two most famous creations, Tarzan or Barsoom. Even the day-to-day writing is not explicated in any way'by Burroughs or Porges'and one is told only that Burroughs was able to churn out full novels in as little as six weeks, that he was capable of writing amid the familial chaos around him. The book is most faithful in accounting for all of the books and stories he wrote for the pulps, at pennies-per-word rates. The continual haggling with editors for better prices, and his maneuverings to get into a higher class of publication are a large part of Burroughs' life, and it's a dull story. Worse is the large investment of time and energy that Burroughs expended in dealing with filmmakers. In the early 20s when he and Hollywood began their wooing dance, filmmaking was still in its infancy, and the process of funding films was even more a house of cards than it is today. Burroughs had several occasions to mistrust filmmakers early on, and it marred his relations with Hollywood later, even when the Weissmuller/O'Hara Tarzan films became a money-making franchise. Burroughs' outspokenness began during the first World War, and he presented his views to the newspapers with articles or editorials about politics. Assuming an everyman voice in these pieces, Burroughs ended up taking stands against socialism, communism, crime, lawyers, and Democrats, adverting to politics and religion as the delusional cynosures of the ignorant masses. Burroughs long held the view that most people were ignorant, that only some sort of idealistic eugenics could bring about a world-wide utopian peace. Burroughs did enjoy a good relation with his readers, and he faithfully responded to every letter he received, even maintaining life-long correspondences with some fans. Burroughs also supported with funds and publicity the formation of Tarzan tribes, clubs for teenagers and younger boys to practice do-gooding and enjoy wholesome physical activity. Burroughs was essentially a very simple man, whose sympathy for animals led him to Tarzan's insight that civilization was at most a veneer and at worst an excuse for cruelties far worse than the savageries of the animal kingdom. Coupled with this was a faith in the working of the human body, that it must be exercised to keep the rest of the organism sane and healthy. A third tenet in his life was the nonsensical nature of organized religion, which ties in with his idea that people are in general ignorant and tractable. These were the cornerstone precepts of his life, along with the idea that fiction was, at best, entertainment (a concession, perhaps, because he always sought and never attained any critical praise for his brand of literature). He stated that authors of fiction were no authority on anything and should restrain impulses to propagandize, a proscription he often ignored. In the first World War, Burroughs succumbed to the propaganda about the German brutality and carnage, and he incorporated in his novels particularly nasty German villains. In the second World War, while teetering on the brink of more racist vituperation against the Japanese, he reconsidered and acknowledged in his writing that Japanese Americans did not deserve death, deportation, or detention. At the outset, Porges explains how he and his wife sifted through all of the Burroughs' correspondence, manuscripts, and journals that the Burroughs family still retained in a separate building on the Tarzana estate. While there were some diaries in the mix, these revealed little about Burroughs inner state or his relations with his wife. It is the matter of his wife, Emma, whom he married when he was twenty-five, that is most alarming. He and she were boon companions at first, and he shared his writing with her, but over the years the bond was broken and he seldom shared with her what he was writing. She took to drink probably out of loneliness, but there is no concrete account of the reasons, nor of the disagreements the two had. Like many a man in his 50s, Burroughs sought the sympathies of another woman, though he did not begin an affair with and then marry her until she and Emma had divorced. There was at least one good year with this woman, but Burroughs began to drink immoderately and they fell away from one another and eventually divorced. Something was going on with Burroughs at this time, but there is no evidence in this biography of the emotional toll it took on him, nor did anything appear in his writing that seemed to correspond with this turbulence. (And part of the problem here is that this personal turmoil took place during the second World War, when paper shortages made publishing prohibitive, so it was during this time that Burroughs took his longest break (almost four years) from writing, when in the past, he'd set himself a goal of three or four novels per year.) This biography's chief virtue is that it contains accounts of nearly every major piece of fiction that Burroughs sold (and even a few that could not find a market) and some of the light verse and essays that he wrote for school publications and newspapers. The portrait of Burroughs is largely positive, but underneath the banter he used in the headstrong dealings he had with editors (and filmmakers) there is the glint of cupidity. There's also a pedestrian ordinariness to Burroughs' life that threatens to make even his fiction pedestrian. I fear that any reader of this biography who has never read any of Burroughs' fiction will wonder why such a biography even exists, why it's necessary to explicate the obvious way Burroughs used his fiction as escapist, life-defining wish-fulfillment. The essential question is how a Walter Mitty writer could spark and keep alive a 50-year phenomenon like Tarzan'appearing internationally in movies, books, comics, newspapers, and on the radio'and part of the answer is prosaic: Burroughs aggressively marketed and made profitable his fiction in as many media as possible. The more magical part of the answer, just how Tarzan became enmeshed in the zeitgeist, is probably beyond anyone's ability to explain, though I'll hazard it begins with reading Burroughs rather than reading about him.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-07-17 00:00:00 Stacy Hooper A rather dry and very long biography of Burroughs.