It was thought, mistakenly, that the Sargasso Sea trapped ships, and contributing to the vivid ship-swallowing myth, this is the conceit that Janvier uses to great effect in his novel.
I had come out from the wheel-house and was standing on the steamer's bridge — which rose right out of the water so that I looked down from it directly on the weed-laden sea. As far as my sight would carry through the soft golden haze I saw only weed-covered water, broken here and there by a bit of wreckage or by a little open space on which the pale sunshine gleamed. A very gentle swell was running, giving to the ocean the look of some strange sort of meadow with tall grass swaying evenly in an easy wind… So far as the world was concerned I was dead already — being fairly caught in the slow eddying current which was carrying my hulk steadily and hopelessly into the dense wreck-filled centre of the Sargasso Sea.
And later:
I had before me what I think must be the strangest sight that the world has in it for the eyes of man. For what I looked at was the host of wrecked ships, the dross of wave and tempest, which through four centuries — from the time when sailors first pushed out upon the great western ocean — has been gathering slowly, and still more slowly wasting, in the central fastnesses of the Sargasso Sea.
Janvier, a traveler, was widely read in his time, which was just a century ago. On his death, the appreciative New York Times obituary praised Janvier for his "suave irony, gentle aloofness," and went on, "His varied books of travel had the same combination of qualities — keen and close observation, with a curious sympathy of understanding and vividness of presentation."
Edgar Rice Burroughs: "I Can Write Better About Places I've Never Seen"
MANY PEOPLE, OF whom I am one, formed their first notions of Africa from the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, specifically the Tarzan books — and films and illustrated comics. Even knowing this was fantasy adventure, readers, young ones especially, felt an incomparable thrill. Burroughs never set foot in Africa, though he knew something about roughing it — he'd been a cowboy, a soldier in the Seventh Cavalry, and a gold miner in Idaho.
He was one of those American writers who was so full of speculative schemes (Twain was another) that they worked their way into his fiction. Burroughs had been a poor student, a failed businessman, and somewhat desperate as a writer when, at the age of thirty-six, he published Tarzan of the Apes as a serial in All-Story magazine. He'd been fascinated by the ethnographic exhibits (native dances, grass skirts, African warriors) and zoo animals he'd seen in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exhibition in 1893. He'd read Burton and Stanley on Africa, as well as H. Rider Haggard adventures and Kipling's Jungle Book. He was asked many times how he came up with the idea of Tarzan. He claimed he didn't know (though Tarzan's upbringing can be compared with Mowgli's in Kipling, and Kipling mentions Tarzan approvingly in his own autobiography, Something of Myself), but said that the character helped him escape from the humdrum life he was leading. "My mind, in relaxation, preferred to roam in scenes and situations I'd never known. I find that I can write better about places I've never seen than those I have."
In Tarzan of the Apes (1914), Tarzan is John Clayton, the son of Lord Greystoke, whose wife has died while living in a remote cabin in West Africa. The female ape Kala, grieving for her own dead baby, kills Lord Greystoke and abducts young Clayton, whom she calls Tarzan ("white skin" in ape language), raising him as her own. Jane Porter, another castaway, also turns up in this first novel, along with a cast of sinister opportunists. Tarzan is not sure who he is, but his skills and his strength have made him Lord of the Jungle. The book was such a hit with readers that a year later he wrote The Return of Tarzan (featuring his marriage to Jane), and altogether twenty-five Tarzan books, other stories with an African setting, as well as a number of westerns and works of science fiction.
After a prolific career as a writer of adventure stories, quite wealthy, living in Hawaii and feeling neglected, Burroughs, at the age of sixty-six, witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He immediately signed up as a war correspondent and traveled throughout the Pacific. He remained in Hawaii until the end of the war.
It is obvious that as he continued to write the Tarzan books he mugged up on Africa. The setting for the Tarzan stories appears to be the Gabon of Du Chaillu's Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. He would have found Swahili in Burton, since Tarzan's Waziri people use accurate Swahili words, such as Mulungu for God, askari for soldier, and shifta for bandit. Tarzan becomes their chief after their own chief dies battling Arab slave traders. A lovely African girl in Tarzan: The Lost Adventure is named Nyama. This is the Swahili word for meat, as well as a generic word for game (and a slang word in East Africa for a low woman). But in all the books Africans are primitive (Tarzan usually mocks them) and not to be compared with the apes, Tarzan's real family. Civilized man is worse than any other—"more brutal than the brutes." The great apes, the Mangani, who are Tarzan's extended family, have a whole language to themselves, which Burroughs invented or contrived from travel book glossaries. One can easily see that Tarzan is the creation of an armchair traveler, a devourer of travel books.
Saul Bellow's Fairly Serious Fooling
BELLOW HAD NOT seen Africa before he wrote Henderson the Rain King (1959), his novel about the larger-than-life Eugene Henderson — war hero, pig farmer, ranter. Very tall and very strong and highly ingenious, Henderson describes himself as "a millionaire wanderer and wayfarer," and he adds, "A brutal and violent man driven into the world… A fellow whose heart said, I want, I want."
This novel, Bellow's favorite, is his weakest, and perhaps because of that, his most revealing: slack writing is full of disclosure.
Bellow, henpecked, exasperated, in need of imaginative relief, felt cornered in an unhappy marriage when he conceived and wrote the book. The African setting, the freedom of Henderson to roam and rant, the transformation that fiction writing allows, were probably a consolation to Bellow. If he couldn't go to Africa and leave his miseries behind, at least he could fantasize about such an escape.
"I am just a traveler," Henderson says to King Dahfu. But to Chief Itelo he said, "Your Highness, I am really kind of on a quest." It seems to me that this is the crux of the matter: Bellow cannot imagine an Africa that is not full of marvels, odd customs, harems, wrestling matches, lion hunts, and the mystical rain ceremony that elevates Henderson to kingship among the Wariri, in the same way that Tarzan is elevated to chief of the similar-sounding Waziri in The Return of Tarzan.
In the imagined world of the nontraveling fiction writer there is usually a convergence of the grotesque and the stereotypical. A comparison of Henderson with Tarzan is not out of place. The difference is that Burroughs admitted he was writing pulp fiction, while the highly intelligent Bellow, self-conscious in this role as fabulist, often plays it for laughs. This novel — strained comedy, occasional farce, and sometimes outright clowning — is unconvincing to anyone who has lived in an African village, yet when Bellow won the Nobel Prize, Henderson was commended as his "most imaginative expedition."
Burton's First Footsteps in East Africa is invoked by Henderson. But the antiquated nature of the travel and Bellow's invented tribes make me think that (like Edgar Rice Burroughs) he was influenced more by Paul Du Chaillu's 1861 Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, in which Du Chaillu, an American of French descent, was made a king of the Apingi tribe in Gabon.