On a July day in 1911 Edgar Rice Burroughs sat in a small office at the intersection of Market and Monroe streets in Chicago. He had borrowed desk space from a friend in order to launch his latest enterprise, an agency for the sale of pencil sharpeners. The salesmen who responded to his ads were sent out on a commission basis. "They did not sell any pencil sharpeners,^" he noted, "but in the leisure moments, while I was waiting for them to come back to tell me that they had not sold any.

What else was there to do? He began to write, the pen seeming oddly small in his heavy fingers. He bore little resemblance to the image of a writer, but there was even less in his appearance to suggest the typical businessman. Since he would seldom draw upon real-life experiences, where would he find the story plots that he needed? His search for excitement, for high adventure in his early years had ended in disappointment. Whatever he found fell far short of his expectations. His youthful spirit of adventure, still unrealized, was temporarily thrust aside. At night, in a happy release from the monotonous daytime routines, it returned to spur his imagination to life. He often lay awake devising fantastic situations and creating his own characters, superhumans who performed incredibly heroic feats in strange worlds and on distant planets.

Now his instincts turned him to the freedom of imagination. His pen swept across the only paper available — orange, blue, and yellow sheets were mixed with white. The blue and yellow ones were old letterheads. He used the backs, shaping words hastily so that they emerged with distinctive flattened or unfinished letters. The u's, r's, m's and n's rose in vague curves above the line, the i's were barely visible, and the crossbars of the t's were dabbed in late beyond the line, out of place, like an afterthought.

Formed in his daydreams and imaginings, the ingredients for many stories — strange encounters, daring rescues, hairbreadth escapes, glorious battles — awaited his summons. As he wrote, the real world of the commonplace became the unreal one; it vanished, and in its place he conjured up a strange fierce civilization set in the midst of a dying planet. The new world closed around him, all sounds of the old were gone, and he was a man lost in a perilous land where science battled against savagery, beauty against ugliness.

The reasons for his unplanned, helter-skelter life were unclear to him. All he knew was that he had held on to nothing, that nothing had become permanent. Even the experience he had gained, astonishing in its variety, was of doubtful value. He had floundered about in the business field, vacillating between being an employee and an entrepreneur.

What turned him to writing was not a sudden perception but rather desperation. He wouldn't understand until some time later that a career solely in the business world was not for him. But now, with all the year's efforts adding up to zero, Burroughs was ready to concede that he was a failure. The distinction, subtle but important — the difference between being a failure and being simply a misplaced man — was beyond him. His mind, to elaborate upon the old saw of the pegs, was designed for stretching a round universe of elastic boundaries, for pushing the boundaries out; there was no way he could exist or fit into the universe of square partitions, of offices, of adding machines, sales, profits, and losses.

The turning point came at a time of bitter realization. He had been involved in still another impossible project, hardly knowing why, and with little faith left. Failure was inevitable. "My business venture," he wrote, "went the way of all other enterprises and I was left without money, without a job and with a wife and two babies.

Ironically, with thirty-five years gone and all else tried, he was ready to put his ideas on paper. But strangely, the experiences he had undergone, the colorful characters he had known — soldiers, cowboys, Indians, and miners — these, the stuff of realism and the reminders of an unstable past, he instinctively avoided. These experiences had physically shaped him into what he was — a solid, muscular man, sturdily framed, with broad shoulders and strong arms. His large hands, a family inheritance, with their thick, powerful fingers drew immediate attention. A masseur in a Turkish bath examined Burroughs' hands and remarked, "We get all kinds of people in here, but this is the first time I ever massaged a blacksmith. Athletics, a vigorous outdoor life, cowpunching and horseback riding — at military school he had vaulted easily into the saddle from a standing position — had combined to develop a physique that altered little through the years.

That was the key, the prayer of all escapists — not to be like other men. Burroughs knew little about the techniques of writing but he understood that those who read his story would have their own dreams and fantasies, their own yearnings to get away from painful reality.

As he wrote he compiled a brief glossary of names and of special words used in the story, to him a fascinating task. A man is true master of a civilization when he can dictate its language, concocting such words as Barsoom — Mars; Iss — River of Death; Woola — a Barsoomian calot or dog; Dejah Thoris — a Princess of Helium; and Helium — the empire of the grandfather of Dejah Thoris.

The list was short, nothing approaching a complete vocabulary, but the words gave a genuine touch to the characters and scenes set on a planet millions of miles distant. The paradox of attempting to weld fantasy with reality and science with the wildest of fiction did not deter him. It was here that Burroughs first demonstrated one of the secrets of his success as a writer — he was able to make the most impossible tale seem as though it were really happening. It had been plausible in his imagination; he was willing to suspend disbelief and he presumed that the reader would respond the same way.

The protagonist, John Carter, was a romantic hero in the most glorious tradition. He was a chivalrous soldier of fortune, an adventurer, a man whose "only means of livelihood" had been fighting. In the foreword, a kind of prologue that is vital to the story, Burroughs describes Carter as:

Burroughs created a character whose background and physical accomplishments were a super version of his own. "His horsemanship, especially after hounds," he wrote, "was a marvel and delight even in that country of magnificent horsemen." Carter had been cautioned about his "wild recklessness," but would respond with a laugh and say "that the tumble that killed him would be from the back of a horse yet unfoaled.".

While prospecting in Arizona, Captain Carter strays into the dangerous territory of the Apaches, a situation duplicated by Burroughs in his activities with the Seventh Cavalry. But Arizona was selected as the briefest of settings; once Carter had faced the hostile Indians, all realism was discarded. Mysteriously transported through space, he finds himself among a race of huge green Martians whose young are hatched in glass incubators from eggs two-and-one-half feet in diameter.

It was a beginning, a tentative release of the bonds that had confined Ed's imagination. He wrote freely, all restraints overcome, and by August of 1911 a substantial section of the Mars story was finished. He had worked "very surreptitiously,^" commenting, "I was very much ashamed of my new vocation and until the story was nearly half completed I told no one about it, and then only my wife. It seemed a foolish thing for a full grown man to be doing — much on a par with dressing myself in a boy scout suit and running away from home to fight Indians." Another, practical circumstance impelled him to secrecy. He still believed his future awaited him in the business world. What would his associates and prospective employers think of a man who abandoned his sober surroundings and projected himself into unbelievable scenes on another planet? Ed feared that both his reputation and his career would be irreparably damaged.

Moreover, he was a novice to publishing; he knew nothing about magazine editors or the procedures for sending a story to them. When he had written twelve chapters, about 180 pages, he sat back to contemplate his work, convinced he had produced enough to demonstrate that he could write. He was pleased to realize that he still had a great deal of material left. The matter of a title became a problem. Uncertain, he settled for "My First Adventure on Mars," a title both weak and colorless. Shortly afterward he lined it out and inserted "The Green Martians"; this too he found unsatisfactory. He was beginning to appreciate the difficulty that all writers face in selecting titles.

Burroughs considered and in the right corner of the manuscript jotted down "Dejah Thoris Martian Princess," following it with question marks. Beneath the title he wrote an odd nom de plume — By Normal Bean. This choice was a measure of his own insecurity and of his modestly humorous appraisal of his writing ability. He wished to stress his ordinariness — that he had a very common head. But his adoption of a pen name was also dictated by his fear of identification with so fantastic a work. The solution was a refuge in anonymity.

Impressed by the popular All-Story magazine, he submitted his story to the magazine's editor and offered a brief summary of the plot:

On August 24, 1911, the answering letter came from the Frank A. Munsey Company in New York, carrying the signature of the managing editor of All-Story Magazine, Thomas Newell Metcalf. An analyst par excellence and a man of succinct habits in writing, he mixed the good news with the bad. "There are many things about the story which I like," he said, "but on the other hand, there are points about which I am not so keen. Undoubtedly the story shows a great deal of imagination and ingenuity; but I am unable to judge . . . the total effect, on account of its unfinished condition.".

Metcalf, with a dry humor, refers to the supposed "taciturnity of the Martians" which Burroughs had emphasized. ". . . yet you have one of the ladies tell a story of a couple of thousand words and often the Tharks talk to a great extent. Somehow, it seems to me you are hardly consistent." The lady was a young green-Martian woman assigned to Carter with combined duties of guide, housekeeper, and tutor. Metcalf, after some hesitation, eliminated the chapter titled "Sola Tells Me Her Story," but Burroughs restored it later in the book form.

Setting a 70,000-word limit, Metcalf went on to end the letter encouragingly: "If it would be possible for you to compress into that length a story as ingenious as is the greater part of what I have read, I should be . . . glad to consider it.".

When Burroughs showed some confusion about the problem of the garrulous Tharks and the long account given by Sola, Metcalf, struggling to balance a natural asperity against a fear of being overblunt, fell into a style that was amusing in its own longwindedness, ". . . may I say that it will be perfectly easy to correct the inconsistency of which we have talked merely by neglecting to say that the Tharks are a taciturn people? At the same time, I believe that you can eliminate a good deal of their conversation.^".

In the letter of August 26, Burroughs had also outlined important sections of the last half of the story for Metcalf, including a vague and unsatisfactory ending scene for his hero, John Carter:

Metcalf, two days later, had his own suggestion for the ending, inquiring, "why would it not be possible to have the Martian city attacked by some kind of a plague, or something of that sort?" The Martian princess would then die, and afterward John Carter would contract the illness and find himself dying; he would awaken in the cave in Arizona.

This suggestion for the last scene proved an inspiration to Burroughs. On September 28 he commented, ". . . worked out the ending along the line you suggested, which is much more satisfactory than that I originally had in mind." But what he had devised far exceeded this modest statement. He had invented an unresolved ending, with the reader (protestingly, as it later developed) clutched and squirming in unbearable suspense. From this first Mars story on, his specialty was to be the unfinished ending and the inescapable sequel.

Burroughs' elation was tempered by a businessman's cold analysis of the payment versus the time consumed. On November 6, he evaluated a future writing profession with considerable skepticism:

This story business is all new to me, but I like the work provided I can make it pay. However, I know that it would not be worth my while to devote all my time to it at this rate, as I started this story in July, which makes the remuneration equivalent to about $100.00 per month.

Annoyed, Burroughs indicated in his letter of February 2 that as a result of the printer^'s blunder he was discarding his nom de plume. In sending a new manuscript he commented acidly:

You will also note that I have used my own name as author. I have done this because what little value was attached to my "trade" name was rendered nil by the inspired compositor who misspelled it in the February '11 Story — or was it the artist? ['11 is an obvious error.].

He finished by taking a humorous, more indulgent attitude:

I liked his illustration so well, however, that I easily forgave him; though I cannot forgive the printer who let "animal" get by for ^"mammal" twice.

6 pulp magazine issues  February - July, 1912 <>
ERB C.H.A.S.E.R. ENCYCLOPEDIA/BIBLIOGRAPHY

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MORE PORGES/ERB REFERENCES IN ERBzine
Foreword by Hulbert Burroughs
Preface by Irwin Porges
https://www.erbzine.com/mag64/6426.html

Introduction by Ray Bradbury
https://www.erbzine.com/mag35/3571.html

 

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