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Volume 0732
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ERB C.H.A.S.E.R ENCYCLOPEDIA
 A Collector's Hypertexted and Annotated Storehouse of Encyclopedic Resources
. . . by an Exhausted Scholar
present
1st Ed Cover by John Coleman Burroughs
ERB, Inc. Edition Cover by Joe Jusko
John Coleman Burroughs: Tarzan and The Foreign Legion - 5 b/w interiors


Larger DJ Image
Large Cover Image
Large Cover Art Image by JCB
ERB, Inc. Ed. Cover by Joe Jusko
TARZAN AND "THE FOREIGN LEGION"
Written June to September 1944
Dedicated to Brigadier General Truman H. Landon
ART BY JOHN COLEMAN BURROUGHS
Publishing History ~ Summary ~ Cast
Lord Greystoke's Paperback Cover Gallery
eText Edition


PUBLISHING HISTORY (USA)

PULP
No magazine release
FIRST EDITION
ERB, Inc. Tarzana: August 22, 1947 ~ 314 pages ~ Print Run: 25,700
    John Coleman Burroughs: DJ and five interiors
REPRINT EDITIONS
Ballantine Books paperback: March 1964 ~ 192 pages
    Robert Abbett cover
Ballantine Books paperback: September 1977
    Boris Vallejo cover
For detailed information, see Robert B. Zeuschner's
Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Bibliography (ERB, Inc., 2016).
Click on www.erbbooks.com or call 214-405-6741 to order a copy.

Click
Tarzan and "The Foreign Legion"
While serving in the R.A.F. under his civilian name of John Clayton, Tarzan is shot down over the island of Sumatra in the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies. He uses his jungle survival skills to save his comrades in arms, and they fight the Japanese while seeking escape from enemy territory. Tarzan also reveals to his companions how in his youth, after saving the life of a witch doctor, he was rewarded by treatment that gave him immortality. According to Tarzan Alive, Philip José Farmer's study of the ape man's life and career, the incident related occurred in January 1912.
.
CAST
(in order of appearance)
Hendrik van der Meer ~ Sumatran rubber planter
Elsje (Verschoor) van der Meer ~ Hendrik's wife
Corrie van der Meer ~ their daughter, aged 16 at outset
Lum Kam & Sing Tai ~ van der Meer's Chinese servants
Hoesin, Taku Muda, Tian Umar ~ Chiefs of Kampongs (villages)
Capt. Tokujo Matsuo ~ apanese army
Lt. Hideo Sokabe ~ Japanese army
Alam ~ Sumatran native who betrays Corrie
S/Sgt. Joe "Datbum" Bubonovitch ~ Lovely Lady waist gunner, Brooklyn NY
S/Sgt. Tony "Shrimp" Rosetti ~ Lovely Lady ball turret gunner, Chicago IL
Capt. Jerry Lucas ~ Lovely Lady pilot, Oklahoma City OK
RAF Col. [Gp. Cap.] John Clayton
TARZAN of the Apes, Lord Greystoke
Iskandar ~ Corrie's kidnapper
Amat ~ Sumatran collaborationist
Lt. Kumajiro Tada ~ Japanese army, once at University of Oregon
Uglo ~ Orangutan chief
Oju ~ Uglo's rival, fights Tarzan, kidnaps Corrie
Vanda ~ mother of organgutan saved by Tarzan
Tak van der Bos ~ reserve officer imprisoned with Tarzan
Hooft, Hugo, Grotius ~ Dutch outlaws living in jungle
Sarina ~ Eurasian living with Dutch outlaws
Lara ~ native girl
Lt. de Lettenhove ~ Dutch army
Capt. Kervyn van Prins ~ Dutch army
Col. Kanji Tajiri ~ Japanese commanding officer
Keta ~ little monkey friend of Tarzan
S/Sgt. Carter Douglas ~ from Lovely Lady, Van Nuys CA
S/Sgt. Bill Davis ~ from Lovely Lady, Waco TX
2nd Lt. Kenzo Kaneko ~ Japanese army
Alauddin Shah ~ village chief, southern Sumatra
Lt. Cmdr. Bolton ~ submarine commander
Cast List Ref: Clark A. Brady's Burroughs Cyclopedia and Ed Stephan's Tarzan of the Internet

Book Blurb Summary
from Ballantine Books

When the American bomber crashed in the jungles of enemy-held Sumatra, the survivors faced the perils of a completely unknown world . . . and the RAF colonel who had flown with them as observer seemed to compound their danger by going mad—stripping to a loincloth and throwing away his weapons except for his knife. But for Colonel John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, the hazards of wild beasts and a remorseless enemy were a familiar and joyously accepted challenge — a chance to return to his true identiy of Tarzan of the Apes. Gathering a motley crew of allies of many nations, Tarzan worked a terrible vengeance on the occupying Japanese, led an epic trek to the coast — to a final ocean rendezvous with enemies human and inhuman.

30 untitled chapters

The original typewritten letter to the Managing Editor of Argosy Magazine from ERB, Inc. secretary, Ralph Rothmund, dated Sept. 1, 1945.  Burroughs is offering the novel "Tarzan and the Foreign Legion," written in Hawaii during the war from June to September 1944. 

On the bottom of the letter is note "Read by Norton - Rejected". On the back of this letter is a note from Popular Publications, which had bought Munsey and Argosy explaining the rejection and returning the manuscript.


JOHN COLEMAN BURROUGHS ART GALLERY
John Coleman Burroughs ERB DJHe hurtled toward deathTarzan closed with Oju
click for larger images

Voiced a low growl and started forwardThey came to the bodyAn arm encircled his head
Visit ERBzine 0205 to see larger images of this JCB art

See the Navigation Chart to the
JCB Tribute Bio & Art Pages at
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John Clayton, Lord Greystoke
LORD GREYSTOKE'S GALLERY
US Paperback Covers
Tarzan and The Foreign Legion - Ballantine Canadian 1964 Edition - Art by Robert Abbett
Boris Vallejo art: Ballantine 1982
Richard Powers art: Ballantine 1963Robert Abbett art: BallantineBoris Vallejo art: Ballantine 1982
UK Paperback Covers
Goulden UK edition 1952Four Square UK Edition 1964New English Library UK edition 1974New English Library UK edition 1975
Foreign
.
Finland 1988 Edition  ~  UK Pinnacle Edition 1958


Finnish Edition ~ Cover art by Ami Hauhio
 "Tarzan käy sissisotaa" ("Tarzan wages guerrilla war").
Later, it was retranslated and reissued as
"Tarzan Sumatran viidakoissa" ("Tarzan in the jungles of Sumatra").


Dutch Editions from the Marten Jonker Collection
 


South Africa Cover Art By Joe Jusko :: New English Library 1975 - Art by W.F. Phillips



GOLD KEY COMICS
Read every page here


Click for poster-size collage


TARZAN AND "THE FOREIGN LEGION"
Review contributed by Doc Hermes ERB Reviews

Written in 1944 but not published until 1947 (and with no magazine serialization), this was the last Tarzan book by Edgar Rice Burroughs, penned only a few years before his death. It`s also one of the very best in the entire series.

Stationed as a war correspondent in Hawaii, Burroughs broke with tradition in many ways with this book. Where the preceding dozen novels had become increasingly repetitious and predictable, here there are real surprises. The writing style is crisp, wry, with sharper pacing and neater characterizaton than had been seen in years. With this last book, Burroughs seemed to take a fresh look at his most famous creation and see him from a different angle.

TARZAN AND THE "FOREIGN LEGION" is set on the country-sized island of Sumatra, where the Japanese forces have been terrorizing the natives and massacring the Dutch colonists. On an American bomber doing recon work, our hero is shot down and finds himself stranded abruptly on Sumatra with a handful of Amrican aviators, soon joined by a succulent blonde teenager. On one level, the storyline is the basic plot that had served Burroughs well for many years. Take Tarzan and a few friends, set up some vicious enemies, throw in some bystanders who could go either way, and mix them all in a junlgle full of natural dangers and wild beasts. There`s not exactly a plot as much as there is a succession of escapes and captures, battles and journeys, with good luck and complete disaster taking turns.

But against the basic action-filled narrative line, Burroughs sets the characters interacting with each other in new and insightful ways. He also loved to match up couples who were obviously meant to get together and then make them suffer as they had misunderstandings and tiffs, and he loved to juggle a large cast with wildly differing motivations, but here he does all this more smoothly and convincingly than ever before.

Most significant is that this book reveals many of Tarzan`s secrets and shows him in sharper definition. For the first third of the book, he is known to the other characters (and referred to by the narrator) as Colonel Clayton of the RAF. Obviously, readers know his true identity but it`s still a stunning moment where it`s revealed.

Tarzan drops naked from a tree onto a tiger about to kill his friends and he slays the enormous cat with his knife (as he has done so many times before). Then he lets loose a horrifying nonhuman victory cry and glares at his friends, lost for a moment in his animal nature. They`re frightened and uncertain, until he shakes if off and almost literally turns back into Clayton. It`s a terrific moment, one of the most impressive scenes in the series and it would hit audiences hard if it were put on the screen.

To cap it off, one of the survivors suddenly recognizes him. ("John Clayton," he said, "Lord Greystoke --- Tarzan of the Apes!"), leading a slightly dim comrade to ask, "Is dat Johnny Weismuller?" Later in the story, when his identity is being challenged, a guerilla fighter says, "And there`s the scar on his forehead that he got in his fight with the gorilla when he was a boy." This is surprising and amusing. The genuine Tarzan knows of all the books and Hollywood movies about him, which in some strange way makes him seem more real.

As good as the book is, it does have a few drawbacks. For one thing, whiles Burroughs obviously did some serious research, he has the orang-utans acting like his typical Mangani apes from back in Africa... challenging Tarzan to a death duel, carrying off a nubile young lady for some intended cohabitation. All of this goes way against what we know now about these primates, but that has to be overlooked. And Tarzan seems pretty casual about tackling tigers; it always seemed more impressive when his fights with big cats were desperate, risky last resorts instead of "oh well, another tiger to kill." Actually, it would have been interesting (considering tigers are bigger and faster than lions) if Tarzan had found himself with his hands full. [I have since been informed that the tigers of Sumatra are in fact considerably smaller than the big equivalent cats of India. If you spot any similar factual mistakes or dumb typo errors in these pages, please e-mail me.]

(I personally have always been irritated by Burroughs' way of idealizing animals into pure incarnations of virtue and constantly putting humans down, but I seem to be the only one annoyed by this practice.)

Also, remembering how Burroughs later apologized for his vicious anti-German speeches in earlier books like TARZAN THE UNTAMED, it`s a little sad to find him twenty years later, once again going on about the sub-human `monkeymen` Japanese and how a righteous hatred against the enemy is a noble thing. (The young heroine says, "I have not killed a man, I have killed a Jap." with her face lit up with "a divine light of exaltation.") But it was 1944 and you have to put yourself in that year to see why a writer would say that.

There are other points worth noting. Tarzan here relates how he has not aged, seeming to be in his twenties while actually in his sixties. He tells the story of the grateful witch doctor who gave him the voodoo treatment years ago and he also mentions the more recent Kavuru drug which he and his family share. But Tarzan is realistic enough to realize he`ll inevitably die one way or another. ("Death has many tricks up his sleeve beside old age. One may outplay him for a while, but he always wins in the end.") From that brief scene, Philip Jose Farmer was inspired to tell his own stories of the Apeman, and of the pastiche heroes Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban.

The rest of the cast is drawn well, if a bit broadly in the WW II multi-ethnic tradition, and the dialogue has a more natural ring to it than in most of the earlier books. The Americans admit they`re scared when facing execution, talk about what war does to people and the nature of hatred, and they all develop emotionally as the story goes on.

In addition to the American aviators of different ethnic and educational backgrounds, there are the toughened Dutch resistance fighters, the heroic young Corrie Van der Meer and the intriguing Sarina, a pirate Eurasian woman descended from headhunters but who sees the light and tries to do the right thing. These people make up the "Foreign Legion", no relation to the famous French Foreign Legion and therefore a bit of a misleading title.

 

Tarzan and "The Foreign Legion"
By Edgar Rice Burroughs 
A Review by Ryan Harvey (Blackgate.com)

Burroughs needs no excuse for discussion in a magazine dedicated to heroic fantasy and planetary romance. Adventure literature as we know it springs from the influence of Burroughs in the early twentieth century. Although pulp magazines existed before Burroughs published Under the Moons of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, this double-punch in 1912 changed the style of this publishing medium for the remainder of its lifetime, and the influence continued into the paperback revolution and on into our era. Burroughs looms as one of the Titans of genre literature. But the true question is: Why am I re-reading so much of his work right now, in concentrated doses that I usually reserve for no author?

One answer is that I enjoy writing about Burroughs almost as much as I enjoy reading him. For an author who supposedly crafted straightforward entertainment, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels contain a remarkable breadth of ideas for debate and consideration. But a deeper reason for such current copious reading of Burroughs is that his work always gives me a unique uplift. In times of uncertainty and concern, I find that no author can temporarily re-energize me than ERB. Even a violent and embittered book, such as the one I’m about to discuss, provides an energy boost like a literary vodka with Red Bull. Burroughs knows how to make life seem wild, colorful, and far removed from the petty concerns of the every day. It isn’t strictly “escapism,” a word I dislike, but a form of romantic empowerment. Burroughs’s daydreams on paper enhance our yearning for that which is beyond what we have to struggle with in day-to-day life.

End of psychological exegesis. The curtain now rises on today’s Tuesday Topic: one of Burroughs’s most unusual books, one that few have read because—let’s face the facts—how many but the most dedicated fans manage to reach Book #22 in a long-running series?

The Tarzan saga comes to its end with Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”. Although two more Tarzan books would appear posthumously, Tarzan and the Madman and the compilation Tarzan and the Castaways, Burroughs had written both previous to “The Foreign Legion.” He wrote this final Tarzan adventure in April–June 1944 in Honolulu during his service as a war correspondent. His own publishing company, Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. (he was the first writer to incorporate himself), released the novel in 1947 with a cover from his son John Coleman Burroughs. It was the last Tarzan book published in the author’s lifetime. Only one more novel would appear before Burroughs’s death in 1950, Llana of Gathol, and that contained four previously published Barsoom novellas.

The Tarzan novels, which made their creator’s fame beginning with Tarzan of the Apes in 1912, limped through an interminable number of volumes and appeared creatively spent by the mid-1930s. The early Tarzan books contain some of Burroughs’s finest writing—the original is an uncontested American classic, and would make my short list of favorite novels—but the repetition among the last ten or so turns maddening. Only hardcore ERB completists can drag themselves through more than one of these late books consecutively. I found Tarzan and the Leopard Man almost impossible to complete, making it the only time I considered tossing aside a Burroughs novel unfinished.

But Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”, the twenty-second published Tarzan novel, shows Burroughs throwing off his formula for a last creative blast, and it’s one of the best entries in the long series. Apparently, Burroughs had also wearied of the continual parade of lost cities in the African jungles, Tarzan getting amnesia, Tarzan impostors, dueling vanished civilizations, and Jane under threat. Or perhaps the inspiration of war action convinced him to turn his writing toward a military adventure starring his most famous creation. Whatever the reason, the author pulled himself out of his slump for a strong final season.

Tarzan had gotten involved in world war before. In the seventh novel, Tarzan the Untamed (1919), set during the Great War, Tarzan fights German invaders who burned down his African estate and kidnapped Jane. The novel still depends on the standard jungle adventuring, only with bloodthirsty German villains as an opening sally. But Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion” puts Tarzan into a World War II movie and casts him alongside a motley bunch of American soldiers right out of Hollywood Central Casting—comic relief included. Trapped on the Japanese-occupied island of Sumatra, they form an ersatz “Foreign Legion”—hence the quotation marks in the title, so readers won’t expect Tarzan to go to Algeria to join the cast of Beau Geste. (John Clayton does speak fluent French, however. It might have worked.)

The story opens brutally when a Dutch family flees the Japanese invasion of Sumatra. The parents both die, leaving their daughter Corrie van der Meer in hiding for two years. Eventually, the Japanese Captain Matsuo and Lieutenant Sokabe find her and carry her off as a prize.

The remainder of the set-up gets taken care of in the next chapter. An American Liberator plane, while on an unarmed reconnaissance mission, gets shot down over the Sumatran wilds. Four of the crew manage to bail out and land safely. British observer Col. John Clayton hits the ground and immediately strips to a loincloth and starts swinging through the trees, right at home in the jungle. It doesn’t take much for Clayton to revert to his true personality of Tarzan of the Apes. As Burroughs has reminded us many times, Clayton feels himself closer to Tarzan than British nobility.

But Tarzan is not alone this time: he’s ready to lead the rag-tag band of soldiers in their deadly exile in enemy territory. His three companions are Capt. Jerry Lucas of Oklahoma, Sgt. Tony “Shrimp” Rosetti from Chicago, and Sgt. Joe “Datbum” Bubonovitch, a Brooklynite with a flair for zoology and big words served with a thickly rendered accent. In the repartee between the group, readers can often catch echoes of service comedies and sometimes the interplay between Monk and Ham from the Doc Savage novels. However, most of the characterization probably derives from Burroughs’s own experience with meeting enlisted men during his time as a war correspondent. His phonetic rendering of Bubonovitch’s and Rosetti’s accents in prose tends toward the annoying, but this was standard way of rendering argot during the time. The humorous exchanges are sometimes witty and other times overplayed, but it’s definitely not Tarzan business-as-usual.

When Tarzan and his “Foreign Legion” learn about the kidnapped Dutch girl in the vicinity, they move immediately to save her. Tarzan executes a clever rescue, but the Japanese pursue the band. Jerry Lucas professes a strong dislike for Corrie—actually for any woman—which immediately means the two will fall for each other hard. We know the rules. A love triangle of sorts develops when the Dutch guerilla fighter Tak van der Bos enters the action, but after a few chapters of doubt, the novel dismisses this conflict with a sentence. Jerry’s own stated “misogyny” and the constant dangers he and Corrie face put up much greater obstacles to their happiness than the love triangle detour. Another romance develops for the team’s other avowed “woman-hater,” Shrimp, when he starts to fall for the Eurasian beauty Sarina, who comes to Corrie’s aid when she least expects it. (This is one of the few moments where Burroughs reverses the expectations of how the Asian characters will act, an event that surprises even Corrie.)

The adventures of Tarzan and his companions on Sumatra puts them up against not only the Japanese occupiers, but also Sumatran collaborators, Dutch pirates, and nature’s own menaces. The heroes get separated, kidnapped, rescued, and reunited through a string of escapades. They eventually join Dutch guerilla fighters to take the combat to the Japanese in some thrilling jungle warfare. The climax features a breathless ocean pursuit, sharks and submarines included.

But Burroughs doesn’t forget his hero’s connection to nature and the animal fantasy aspect of Tarzan’s legacy. Tarzan discovers he can communicate with the orangutans on the island as well as he can the apes of Africa. He gets in a classic “fight for supremacy” with one of bulls of an orangutan tribe, Oju. Later, Tarzan has to face Oju again after the furious bull ape kidnaps Corrie.

Much of this sounds like a standard Tarzan actioner, but it doesn’t read that way. Tarzan serves as a superhero who gets people out of jams and uses his jungle-lore when needed, but his companions are the true protagonists. This shift toward the supporting cast gives readers an outside perspective on the famous hero that rarely appears in the other books. Tarzan vanishes for extended periods, and the war action stays with the hardy and good-naturedly bickering American soldiers and the resourceful Corrie.

The inclusion of these additional heroes allows the story to develop more character interaction, and even some philosophical discussions. In one section, the Foreign Legionnaires debate the nature of war—and what hatred does for and to a person in conflict. “Hatred” forms the most important theme of the novel, which the characters revisit many times between the action. Burroughs approaches the idea of hated in an ambivalent way. Sometimes characters speak about the way hate twists people, such as what it has done to change Corrie, but at other times hatred seems the only logical response. In a talk with Corrie, Jerry makes the point that “Tarzan says that it does no good to hate, and I know he’s right. But I do hate—not the poor dumb things that shoot at us and whom we shoot at, but those who are responsible for making wars.” And Corrie responds that she feels she does not hate enough: “You never saw your mother hounded to death and your father bayoneted…. If you had and didn’t hate them you wouldn’t be fit to call yourself a man.” These moments add a layer of moral complexity to the novel that is rare in Burroughs later writing.

One philosophy that Burroughs spends scant time on is patriotism. This will strike many as odd, considering that Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion” is a wartime adventure with American soldiers battling the Japanese. But Burroughs creates a world of chaos where the only true motivation that makes sense is hatred for the declared enemy. This is a social as well as physical jungle, and operates under the jungle’s law. The story makes the enemy clear, but it rarely waves the flag for freedom and democratic ideals. Is this an embittered Burroughs speaking? Or does the story merely have no place for this philosophy, choosing instead to highlight the individual’s struggle over the nation’s? “I don’t think any of us know what we are fighting for except to kill Japs, get the war over, and get home,” Jerry says during one interlude. “After we have done that, the goddam politicians will mess things all up again.”

But Burroughs’s cynicism about warfare doesn’t mean he treats the established enemy with any sensitivity. There’s no point in belaboring the way the he describes the Japanese. It’s ugly and in synch with the “power of hate” theme. Burroughs wrote the book during the height of the war in the Pacific, so don’t expect an even-handed Letters from Iwo Jima treatment. In fact, expect the treatment of the enemy to get quite brutal, with the Japanese described as “monkeys” of low intelligence and undiluted savagery. (The exception is the character of Lt. Tada, who is vicious, but has an excellent, even witty grasp of colloquial English. I wish he appeared in more of the book, since he makes a multi-faceted villain.) Burroughs probably based a lot of the racial insults on what he had heard from the soldiers he knew during his time as a war reporter.

However, and this the pulp scholar and objective academic in me speaking, I find the xenophobia and racism on display one of the book’s fascinating aspects; while reprehensible, they shed light on World War II attitudes without the prism of modern sensibilities. No writer would approach this material in the same way today. However, O Casual Reader, you have been warned. Not that I imagine casual readers will pick up this novel, and pulp fans and Burroughs enthusiasts will know what to expect from the time period.

The most refreshing character in the story is Corrie, who proves herself a capable shot with a rifle and a skilled archer in her jungle adventures. It feels as if Burroughs is trying to create a semblance of a 1940s woman, far removed from the types he had once written at the start of his career. Corrie still gets kidnapped and seized a lot, however. Burroughs wasn’t ready to totally break his formula into pieces.

The author treats his famous hero in some unusual ways. The name “Tarzan” doesn’t even appear until a quarter of the way through the page count. Tarzan’s companions finally realize Colonel Clayton’s identity when they watch him wrestle and kill a tiger with his bare hands. Burroughs can’t resist a referential joke in this heroic moment:

…raising his face to the heavens, [he] voiced a horrid cry—the victory cry of the bull ape. Corrie was suddenly terrified of this man who had always seemed so civilized and cultured. Even the men were shocked.

Suddenly recognition lighted the eyes of Jerry Lucas. “John Clayton,” he said, “Lord Greystoke—Tarzan of the Apes!”

Shrimp’s jaw dropped. “Is dat Johnny Weismuller?” he demanded.

No Shrimp, this fellow can speak in complete English sentences.

There is another instance in the book where it appears that people know Tarzan from popular culture: they know who he is and about his previous adventures. Since Burroughs often wrote his stories from the perspective of a fictional version of himself, a reader might assume that the pseudo-Burroughs documents have made it to the rest of the world, and apparently made it into the movies.

In another intriguing detour late in the story, Tarzan suggests that he has achieved longevity, perhaps even immortality, from an African witchdoctor. This explains how he has appeared as a young, virile man in adventures stretching back to before World War I. In another meta-reference, Jerry comments after hearing this: “I never gave a thought to your age, Colonel…. but I remember now that my father said he read about you when he was a boy. And I was brought up on you. You influenced my life more than any one else.”

Tarzan further elaborates on his opinion of his possible immortality:

“Would you want to live forever?” asked van der Bos.

“Of course—if I never had to suffer the infirmities of old age”

“But all your friends would be gone.”

“One misses the old friends, but one constantly makes new ones. But really my chances of living forever are very slight. Any day, I may stop a bullet; or a tiger may get me, or a python. If I live to get back to my Africa, I may find a lion waiting for me, or a buffalo. Death has many tricks up his sleeve beside old age. One may outplay him for a while, but he always wins in the end.”

Two ideas come to mind when I read this passage. One is that Jane, Tarzan’s wife, receives no mention anywhere in this novel. Has she perhaps died, or aged beyond Tarzan’s young years and left him? The second is that Burroughs, nearing his seventieth birthday when he wrote the novel, knew his own mortality was approaching. The elegiac power of this section is surprising.

But readers can safely answer the debate about Tarzan’s immortality: yes, he will live forever. Heroic icons such as he can never truly die. It is rare for an author to create an enduring popular culture immortal: Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, Bram Stoker with Dracula, Ian Fleming with 007. Burroughs achieved it with Tarzan. And this last adventure—a powerful surge of action, characterization, comedy, fury, hatred, and rumination—proves why Tarzan at the last towers as, truly, Tarzan the Invincible.
 


Tarzan Art by Joe Jusko

 Tom Yeates (Penciller) ~ Sam Glanzman (Inker) 


Tarzan and "The Foreign Legion" is one of our favourites.
We had a great month-long adventure on the islands of Indonesia in 2019
Using our e-text edition as a handbook we explored the Sumatra jungles, observed wildlife and climbed volcanoes.
Although ERB had never been there he made good use the descriptions supplied by his Dutch military acquaintances.
There are still many remnants of the longtime Dutch occupation throughout the islands.
www.hillmanweb.com/indonesia/sumatra
www.hillmanweb.com/indonesia

Click for full size


A curiosity piece.
The only time that I know of that ERB "self-censored" something in one of his books :)
Half-way down page 25: ". . . from an air field in (censored)."
Obviously he was caught up in the mood of wartime protocol -
after all, he was the oldest war correspondent in the Pacific Theatre.


OUR JAPANESE PROBLEM
by Edgar Rice Burroughs ~ ERBzine 0941
 http://www.erbzine.com/mag9/0941.html

From the ERBzine Lost Words of ERB
 http://www.erbzine.com/mag2/0219.html
and
ERB: The War Years Series
 http://www.erbzine.com/mag10/1019.html




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Heins' Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs
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