Smoking in ERB’s Fiction I
by Alan Hanson
Harold Bince had a fatal habit. Oh sure, the immediate cause
of his death was a sudden meeting with the concrete of a Chicago sidewalk.
The evening edition of the Chicago newspapers had all the details. Bince,
having just been exposed as the murderer of his boss, walked briskly across
the courtroom and leaped through an open window to his death four stories
below. In doing so, though, he was merely choosing his own form of execution.
For the real cause of Harold’s demise, we have to go back to the night
of the murder. Having just shot his employer to death, Bince descended
the stairway to the street level. Prior to stepping out of the main entrance,
however, Bince felt the fatal urge. He struck a match on the door panel
to light a cigarette, and the light revealed his features to another man
hiding in the stairwell. When this witness identified Bince in court, the
murderer gave up his smoking habit and his life in a final leap.
Harold Bince was just one of about 100 characters with
a smoking habit in the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. From heroes like
Barney Custer and Gordon King to villains like Achmet Zek and Wilson Crumb
to colorful characters like “Gunner” Patrick and Dopey Charlie,
ERB’s stories are laced with characters who used tobacco, whether it be
cigarettes, cigars, pipes, or chew.
In real life, Burroughs was a smoker himself. In the Porges
biography, Hulbert Burroughs reminisced about his father’s tobacco
habit. “He used cigarettes most of his life, yet strangely he never
inhaled. For many years, he rolled his own, using the little booklets of
cigarette paper and drawstring pouches of Bull Durham tobacco. He took
pride in being able to roll a cigarette with one hand. Later he switched
to Prince Albert. With the advent of factory-made cigarettes he gave up
rolling his own.”
It is not surprising, then, that ERB used tobacco often
in establishing moods, developing characters, creating themes, and even
moving plots along, such as in the case mentioned above from The
Efficiency Expert. Another example of Burroughs using the smoking
habit as a plot devise occurs in the second half of The Mucker.
After being convicted of murder, Billy Byrne was being taken by train to
Joliet. When the deputy sheriff escorting him decided he would like to
go to the smoking car, Billy took the opportunity to escape by pulling
the deputy off the train with him as they passed between cars on the way
to the smoker.
Only occasionally, however, did Burroughs use smoking
in his plotting. Much more often he used it to build his settings and develop
his characters. For instance, in The Mad King, ERB used Barney
Custer, a Nebraska evening, and a good cigar to create a quiet, peaceful
mood. “After the other members of his family had retired, Barney sat smoking
within a screened porch off the living room. Barney’s cigar, long since
forgotten, had died out. Not even its former fitful glow proclaimed his
presence upon the porch, whose black shadows completely enveloped him.”
This gentle scene led up to Captain Maenck’s attempt to firebomb Barney’s
house.
Another example of smoking being involved in the creation
of a mood, this time a happy one, is in The Son of Tarzan,
when a French army officer gave his men a break. “Lazily he puffed upon
a cigarette and watched his orderly who was preparing the evening meal.
Captain Armand was well satisfied with himself and the world. A little
to his right rose the noisily activity of his troop of sun-tanned veterans,
released for the time from the irksome trammels of discipline, relaxing
tired muscles, laughing, joking, and smoking as they, too, prepared to
eat after a twelve hour fast.”
Another mood that Burroughs often used tobacco smoke to
create is relaxation. Lost in Caspak in The Land That Time Forgot,
Thomas Billings found he could still relax as long as his cigarettes held
out. “After dinner I rolled a cigarette and stretched myself at ease
on a pile of furs before the doorway, with Ajor’s head pillowed in my lap
and a feeling of great content pervading me.” Another person who knew that
feeling was Gordon King in “Jungle Girl.” He needed something to help
him relax after his first night in the Cambodian jungle. “His position,
well above the floor of the jungle, imparted a feeling of security; and
the quiet enjoyment of a cigarette soothed his nerves.”
Contemplation was still another mood the slowly rising
smoke of a cigarette helped Burroughs create. In Tarzan and the Leopard
Men, Old Timer sat by the fire musing about the woman in the nearby
tent. “The man’s mind was occupied with thoughts of her, thoughts that
hung with bulldog tenacity despite his every effort to shake them loose.
In the smoke of his pipe he saw her, unquestionably beautiful beyond comparison.”
Then, in the Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County, Buck Mason,
posing as the dude Bruce Marvel, sorted his thoughts in trying to determine
the real murderer of Ole Gunderstrom. The other guests had retired for
the evening, but “on the ranch house veranda Marvel had stamped out
the fire of his last cigarette and was sitting with his feet on the rail
thinking.”
While Burroughs portrayed a smoke as a pleasant thing
in certain circumstances, he made it equally clear that it could be most
unpleasant to be caught smoking on other occasions. In The Oakdale
Affair, Soup Face discovered the peril in being surprised while
one is smoking. After hearing some information that could make Soup Face
and his band of hoboes rich, “Soup Face opened his mouth, letting his
pipe fall out on his lap, setting fire to his ragged trousers.”
Burroughs also used smoking to create a feeling of conviviality
between two characters. In fact, on a couple of occasions, the fictional
Edgar Rice Burroughs himself was able to coax a story from a friend as
they shared a smoke. In The Moon Maid, Burroughs reported
that after meeting Julian 3rd in the dining room of the Transoceanic Liner
Harding, “We found my room and there we had a bottle of wine and some
little cakes and a quiet smoke and became better acquainted.” By the
following morning, Julian 3rd had told the author the story of his grandson,
Julian 5th.
Tobacco in Character Development
In addition to creating moods, Burroughs
often used the smoking habit to develop characters. For instance, the chain-smoking
habit of Eddie the Dip in The Girl From Farris’s was basic
in building his image as an unsavory character. “At Twenty-Fourth Street
a pimply faced young man boarded the car. As he walked forward toward the
front platform, a lighted cigarette in his nicotine-stained fingers, he
turned to stare into the face of every woman in the car.” In Eddie’s
(and ERB’s) defense, it should be noted that in this story, as well as
in other Burroughs stories, unsavory appearance and unsavory habits were
not necessarily signs of unsavory character. It was Eddie who hocked his
jewelry to buy June Lathrop some nice clothes so that she could apply for
a job.
ERB was often fond of using smoking as a sign of how his
characters reacted when under pressure. Among those who lit up when the
going got tough was Ferdinand in The Lad and the Lion. When
faced with having to tell his mistress that his father, the King, was requiring
him to marry another woman, “Ferdinand looked very uncomfortable. He
lit a cigarette and threw it away; then he drank a cocktail at a single
gulp and lighted another cigarette.” Then, in Tarzan and the
Forbidden City, while Gregory was waiting for word about his kidnapped
daughter, “he commenced to pace the floor, smoking one cigar after another.”
At the other end of the spectrum are those characters
whose smoking reflected an inner courage while under pressure. Tarzan’s
father is an example. As the Fulwalda mutineers went about their grisly
work of butchering their officers in Tarzan of the Apes,
Lord Greystoke calmly watched. “Through it all John Clayton had stood
leaning carelessly beside the companionway puffing meditatively upon his
pipe as though he had been watching an indifferent cricket match.”
Barney Custer was another man for whom smoking was a sign of inner strength.
Upon hearing himself condemned to die as a Serbian spy, Barney “mechanically
drew a cigarette from his pocket and lighted it. There was no bravado in
the act. On the contrary, it was done almost unconsciously." Later,
“the
American walked silently toward his death, puffing leisurely at his cigarette.”
Another who calmly faced death with a cigarette in his mouth was Bridge
in The Oakdale Affair. Sitting in a jail cell waiting to
be lynched, Bridge coolly rolled a cigarette, while his partner in crime,
The Oskaloosa Kid, trembled in his (or rather her) boots.
Between the cowardly and courageous smokers are those
who smoked to create the image of calmness, while, in fact, the strain
inside was great. Take the reaction of Albert Werper as he sat one evening
in his tent fondling his newly acquired jewels of Opar. In a mirror he
saw Achmet Zek watching him, and the Belgian knew his life depended on
his acting cool at that fateful moment. “Without haste, he replaced
them in the pouch, tucked the latter into his shirt, selected a cigarette
from his case, lighted it and rose slowly toward the opposite end of the
tent.” Thinking himself unseen, Zek withdrew and Werper got his opportunity
to escape.
Tobacco Themes in ERB’s
Fiction
Romanticizing cigarette smoking in
the media was in vogue in Burroughs’ time, and he certainly did his share
of it, especially in his Western novels. However, he was also aware of
the unpleasant side of smoking. In Beware! Euphonia Thorn
called smoking “a filthy habit,” and in The Efficiency Expert,
the Lizard referred to a cigarette as “a coffin-nail.” There are even a
few Burroughs characters who were clearly addicted to cigarettes. Neal
Brown was one of them in Tarzan’s Quest. The pilot from Chicago
was at the controls of a flight from London to Nairobi, carrying Jane Clayton,
Kitty and Alexis Sborov, and others, when the airplane went down in an
African forest. As the survivors prepared to walk out to civilization,
each had to decide what to carry. Although he “knew the bitterness of
heavy packs,” Brown crammed the contents of a carton of cigarettes into
various pockets and the inside of his shirt.” While Brown proved fearless
in the jungle, he apparently could not face life without a cigarette.
One Burroughs character that literally could not live
without a smoke was Billy Ferry in Pirate Blood. “Mother!”
he screamed. “Mother I am coming!” cried Billy just before leaping into
the Pacific Ocean from the gondola of a tiny blimp he had built. It could
be argued that Billy took the final plunge because he could no longer could
handle the stress of battling Johnny Lafitte for control of the blimp,
but more likely that stress was due more to a lack of nicotine. You see,
just as the blimp was rising from the ground at the Glenora, California,
airport, Johnny threw over the suitcases he supposed were all filled with
the money Billy had stolen from the Glenora National Bank. However, there
was something of greater value than money to Billy in one of those suitcases,
as Johnny was to find out. “Occasionally (Billy) would get to thinking
about the fortune I dumped overboard and then he’d be pretty glum for awhile,
but what really griped him more than the loss of the swag was the fact
that there had been twelve cartons of cigarettes in one of the suitcases
I had jettisoned.” Johnny and Billy had just thirty-two cigarettes
left between them and although Billy got the all and cut himself down to
three a day, they eventually were gone and Billy’s composure began to deteriorate.
In the case of Billy Perry, as with Harold Bince, surely smoking was a
major factor in, if not the clinical cause of, his death
Before closing this general discussion of smoking in ERB’s
fiction, let’s travel to another world. There was no smoking on Barsoom
or any other of his extra-terrestrial worlds, but that does not mean the
urge to do so didn’t reach across the void from Earth. In Carson
of Venus, when Carson Napier and Duare tried to walk away from
the warrior women of Houtomai without being noticed, Carson’s nerves cried
out for a remedy available only on a neighboring planet 26 million miles
away. “Right then I would have given a lot for a rear-sight mirror,”
recalled Carson. “I wanted to see what was going on behind us, but I
didn’t dare look back for fear of suggesting we were doing something we
shouldn’t be — it was a case of nonchalance or nothing, and not a cigarette
of any brand among us.”
— The End —
