The Cave Girl – Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1913-17 ★

All Perspiration, No Inspiration

The strongest feeling you get, from both reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and reading about his amazing career, is how critical the principle of flow was for him.

There’s narrative flow: Keep everything moving all the time, so the reader keeps reading.

There’s concept flow: Always work in new ideas in your fiction, even when they closely resemble older ones.

Then there’s product flow: Never stop writing, because you need the money.

For Burroughs, pulp fiction was a means of survival, escaping a life selling pencil sharpeners to support his wife and two small children. Living by his wits, he found out he not only could make it in life but make out rather well. In 1912, his first year as a published author, he introduced the world to not one but two figures who remain famous both in fantasy fiction and well beyond it: Tarzan the Ape Man and John Carter, Warlord of Mars.

And Burroughs kept on writing. He wrote more stories about Tarzan and John Carter, and other stories, too. Pulp fiction meant writing for magazines, not books; the more characters you had being published in pulps at one time, the more money you could make. Burroughs eventually became good at making money, a lot of it, as his life story attests. Many struggling authors dream of living in a big house; Burroughs got to do that, too, in a town named after his most famous character, Tarzana, California.

To be so successful, Burroughs couldn’t afford to be too proud. He revisted old ideas, rehashed characters and situations, and rewrote earlier successes into thinly disguised new packages. Which brings us to the novel under review today, The Cave Girl.

Originally published in three successive issues of All-Story magazine in 1913, just a year after Tarzan and John Carter debuted in the same publication, The Cave Girl is actually the story of a man. Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones is the scion of a family of Boston bluebloods. Sick from a persistent cough, he goes on a long voyage in the South Pacific to recuperate. A giant wave washes him overboard. Waldo finds himself on the beach of a strange island, where he feels himself being watched. Because he is so weak and timid, he spends many days starving on the beach, too afraid to move more than a few steps beyond the crashing surf. Then desperation propels him into the deep jungle beyond, to confront a lurking creature. If he can’t improve his life, he might as well end it.

His situation, it turns out, is much like Tarzan’s. Waldo is marooned and forced to forge a new life in a savage jungle wilderness. If he doesn’t exactly have Tarzan’s connection to British peerage through Lord and Lady Greystoke, he's close to nobility by American standards.

Burroughs changes up the formula by making Waldo a total wimp. His very name suggests a connection to a certain type of effete Easterner pulp-fiction enthusiasts would no doubt have despised. Burroughs doesn’t play subtle with this:

Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones was not overly courageous. He had been reared among surroundings of culture plus and ultra-intellectuality in the exclusive Back Bay home of his ancestors.

He had been taught to look with contempt upon all that savored of muscular superiority – such things were gross, brutal, primitive.

It had been a giant intellect only that he had craved – he and a fond mother – and their wishes had been fulfilled. At twenty-one Waldo was an animated encyclopedia – and about as muscular as a real one.

As fantasy action-figure introductions go, this one is pretty amusing. How many other heroes in a savage land make their first impressions with skinny arms and trembling legs? In the next four chapters, we see him fight off a band of savage cavemen, more or less by accident; impress a beautiful jungle maiden named Nadara, who declares him a man of bravery and brawn; and run away from Nadara and her village when she tries to introduce him to a couple of thugs she thinks he will make short work of.

Such a character suggests a clever MAD magazine parody; Burroughs and his readers expected something else. Which is what Burroughs delivers. In the space of a few paragraphs, Waldo goes from knock-kneed wimp into a superman, courtesy of a six-month physical-training regimen that no creature on this savage island thinks of interrupting. He takes to heart the name Nadara gave him, Thandar, deciding he will be Waldo no more. After a perfunctory slaying of a wandering caveman to give him confidence, Thandar heads back to the maiden’s village to win her love, or die trying.

Burroughs sums it up like this:

The old Waldo Emerson, whose temperature had risen regularly at three o’clock each afternoon, whose pitifully skinny body had been racked by coughing continually, whose eyes had been terror filled by day and by night at the restling of dry leaves, was dead.

In his place stood a great, full blooded man, brown skinned and steel thewed; fearless, self-reliant, almost brutal in his pride of power – Thandar, the cave man.

Here lies the main business of The Cave Girl. It’s a torturous affair, not because it is so complicated but because it is so simple. Basically, Thandar/Waldo has a number of adversaries to vanquish over the course of several chapters. These include caveman villains such as Korth and Flatfoot as well as a giant black panther who roams the island, known as Nagoola and feared by all. Even Nadara isn’t so crazy about Thandar after he cut and ran on her back at the village. She must be wooed.

All this Thandar performs in deadening, perfunctory style. It becomes a motif of the book, the way things keep happening without let-up or even much of a set-up. Either Thandar is chasing something through the jungle, or being chased himself. In time, he manages to fashion a crude sword and spear, which gives him some advantage but also makes him seem a bit of a bully, slaying opponents who fight with their hands and teeth.

Readers of a 1949 Dell paperback edition of The Cave Girl got both the alluring bearskin babe and a map detailing where on the island various incidents in the novel occur. The title is missing the The, though. [Image from www.thewildstars.com]

Here you come back to the concept of flow, in its narrative form, and its importance to Burroughs. He wrote for an audience that couldn’t be counted on to keep reading. They hadn’t bought a book, they had bought a magazine, with other stories to engage them if his didn’t. Success was thus a Darwinian struggle to be read, or else extinguished. Burroughs responds here by never easing up on the throttle.

So what if Waldo/Thandar and Nadara don’t start out speaking the same language? Burroughs doesn’t have the time or interest to develop this. Instead, with the help of some sign language, they soon exchange words and eventually full sentences. Whenever the action sags, someone can be counted on to burst out of the jungle verdure and either attack Thandar or abduct Nadara, so as to rev up the pace.

The novel as I have it is actually in two parts. After publishing The Cave Girl in 1913, Burroughs went back to the well and published The Cave Man in the same magazine four years later. The Cave Man appears in the edition I have as Part 2; it continues the story of Thandar and Nadara where The Cave Girl lets off.

The formula set in The Cave Girl continues unabated. This time there is an earthquake, and pirates. Nadara is abducted yet again, this time off the island, and Thandar sets out to find her. The Cave Man runs a bit longer, but if anything jacks up the inexplicable-coincidence machine. Thandar has no idea where Nadara has gone, and knows the Pacific is a big place to go looking without a compass or a clue, but having left Waldo back on the beach he builds a boat and sails off after her anyway. This gives Burroughs an excuse to put Thandar in a hurricane, a rare spot of first-rate prose which ends with the protagonist finding himself tumbling in a “bottomless abyss.” Fortunately for him, there is an island just beyond waiting for him, and of course it is the same island where his beloved is now being held captive.

The vintage paperback I bought at a thrift store comes with a lurid Frank Frazetta illustration of a voluptuous, bikini-and-loincloth-clad woman posed with a spear between two growling saber-toothed tigers. There are no tigers, saber-toothed or not, in The Cave Girl, but Burroughs does present us in Nadara a woman who actually makes the Frazetta cover girl seem overdressed. When she first meets Waldo, she thinks nothing of stripping off and having her bath in the sea tide, which embarrasses him deeply.

Later, Thandar explains to a patient but confused Nadara why any jungle love between them is out: “If you were mine I should not care so much, but you cannot be mine until we have reached civilization and you have been made mine in accordance with the laws and customs of civilized men.”

The fact Burroughs wrote this in 1912 should be considered, but there’s a stodgy quality to the way these ideals are described, as if they are included so as not to offend the bluer noses among All-Story’s readership. Another writer could make something interesting, even passionate out of Thandar’s noble refusal to have sexual intercourse with his willing beloved until their union can be properly blessed. Forbearance can be sexy; think Abelard and Héloïse. But Burroughs isn’t interested in Thandar and Nadara as a love story. He isn’t interested in Nadara at all except as something Thandar must rescue from time to time to keep the plot from drooping.

With all the struggles Burroughs employs to keep your interest, the struggle that looms largest is the author’s painful need to sustain that flow and keep you reading. But what if inspiration is low, the author out of ideas and unable even to care about his characters or setting? The result is The Cave Girl.