Philip José Farmer’s Pulp
Trinity
By Dennis E. Power
Philip José
Farmer’s fascination with the characters of Tarzan and Doc Savage are well
known. He had after all written biographies of both characters and fulfilled
his life long dream of writing both an authorized Doc Savage novel, Escape
from Loki, and an authorized Tarzan novel, Dark Heart of Time. Additionally
Tarzan and Doc Savage turned up in many of Farmer’s works, although often
in disguise. What does not get as much attention however is Farmer’s fascination
with another pulp figure, The Shadow, who also appeared in various guises in some
of his works.
I believe
that Farmer’s first Tarzan pastiche was also his first attempt at a “fictional
author” piece. Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod was the story of Tarzan as it
had been written by William S. Burroughs rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The most
obvious example is his pastiche, A Feast Unknown in which he fulfilled a
fan’s dream of not only having Tarzan and Doc Savage meet but fight. Of course
the novel was much more than just an extended piece of fan fiction. He used
these two archetypes of pulp fiction to examine the connection between sex and
violence, not simply because they were pulp conventions because of their
pervasiveness
Farmer
followed A Feast Unknown with Lord of the Trees and The Mad
Goblin. These were separate adventures of Lord Grandrith, (Farmer’s Tarzan
based character) and Doc Caliban, (Farmer’s Doc Savage based character).
However these were more along the lines of pure pastiche and while entertaining
did not have the visceral impact of A Feast Unknown.
While A
Feast Unknown dealt in part with the reality of the Tarzan character,
demonstrating in a few effective passages how literally inhuman and
“uncivilized” a man raised by apes in primitive
Having
proven that Tarzan could not have existed did not deter Philip José Farmer from
writing Tarzan Alive, his biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan. Tarzan
Alive has been called a hoax biography of Tarzan, since it posited that
Tarzan was a living person. Inspired by other fictional biographies such as W.S
Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street or C. Northcote
Parkinson’s The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower,
Farmer wanted to do something along the same lines for Tarzan. He wanted to
create a biography that would be realistic enough to convey plausibility. This
meant arguing that Burroughs’ Tarzan biographies were not literal truth but
exaggerated fiction based on true events. In Lord Tyger Farmer
demonstrated why it would be nearly impossible for a feral child like Tarzan to
exist. In Tarzan Alive Farmer used the same sort of logic but with the
intent to make Burroughs as true as possible yet still seem plausible enough to
be believable. Tarzan Alive would also be a vehicle by which he could
disseminate the concept of an extended family consisting primarily of
fictitious characters.
Concurrent
with Tarzan Alive came another novel, Time's
Last Gift, which had a Tarzan like character in it. In this novel a group
of scientists travel to 12,000 B.C. in the first time travel expedition. The team’s medical doctor was named John
Gribardsun. It is gradually revealed in the book that this man was Tarzan. When
the H. G. Wells returned to the future, Gribardsun, who was immortal, stayed
behind to experience the past. Some fans believe that the initials of Times
Last Gift, TLG, actually refer to Tarzan, Lord Greystoke. Time’s Last
Gift may have been written as a stand alone piece written around the same
time as Tarzan Alive. The dates of Gribardsun’s birth and his back-story are
different enough from those in of Tarzan in Tarzan Alive so that they
may have been meant to two entirely separate works. Or it may have been that
Farmer was just being canny enough to make the characters dissimilar enough to
avoid of the ire of the Jungle Lord for having revealed his most deeply held
secret.
Building
on the concepts that he created in Tarzan Alive, Philip José Farmer’s
next use of Tarzan was in another fictional author story. The Adventure of
the Peerless Peer, wherein Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson met Tarzan.
Although this was not an official Tarzan novel, Farmer had gotten permission
from the Burroughs estate to use the name of Greystoke. When this permission
was withdrawn later he rewrote the story as The Adventure of the Three
Madmen and substituted Mowgli for Tarzan.
Also
appearing in that 1974 was Hadon of Opar, the first of Philip José Farmer projected
series of Opar books. He planned to tell the history of Opar, the ruined city
which plays so prominent a role in Burroughs’ Tarzan novels. Farmer additionally
and unofficially planned to also tell the story of the lost African cities from
H. Rider Haggard’s Quatermain and She series by creating writing the history of
Khokarsa, a lost civilization that existed in Neolithic Africa. Tarzan also
makes an appearance in Hadon of Opar, although entirely in the
background. He is known as a god to the Khokarsans named Sahhindar. As
explained in a previous article, Sahhindar is derived from Zantar, which was
Burroughs first version of the Tarzan name. In the chronological appendix to
Hadon of Opar specifically stated that the Tarzan like character from Time’s
Last Gift was indeed Tarzan which is how Tarzan got to be in Hadon’s epoch.
There was one further novel in the Opar series Flight to Opar before a
variety of factors led to the series being discontinued.
Farmer
wrote one more piece centering on Tarzan that came out
in 1974 called Extracts from the Memoirs of "Lord Greystoke"
This piece seems to have been an update of information previously discussed in Tarzan
Alive but modified to coincide with “new information” posed by Time’s
Last Gift and the Hadon series.
This was
Tarzan’s last appearance in Farmer’s work until The Dark Heart of Time,
which was an actual authorized Tarzan novel.
Philip José
Farmer’s second favorite pulp character was Doc Savage. He appeared as Doc
Caliban in Farmer’s A Feast Unknown and The Mad Goblin. However
Farmer did not use Doc Savage to the same extent as he did Tarzan. Most of
Doc’s appearances in Farmer’s work were limited to cameo roles rather than as
central characters.
In 1973 Doc
Savage: His Apocalyptic Life was published; this was Farmer’s biography of
Doc Savage. While Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life continued with the conceits
that Farmer had begun in Tarzan Alive, that Doc was a true living person and
was part of a larger family tree of supposedly fictional people, the book was
not as detailed in its approach. Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life seems
a bit cursory when compared to Tarzan Alive but the fault lies more with
the source material than with Philip José Farmer. The Tarzan saga consists of 26 volumes;
Doc Savage’s consists of 181. If Farmer had truly attempted a definitive
biography based on all 181 sagas, it would have taken his entire life.
Doc
Savage made a cameo in his short story After King Kong Fell which was
also published in 1973.
His next
appearance in a published work was a parody cameo in “Great Heart Silver in
Showdown at Shootout” in Weird Heroes Volume 1. 1975. Doc Savage with his two
aides Monk and Ham as very old men were among those who participated in the
pulp/adventure hero armageddon
that took place in Shootout. Every conceivable character from the pulps and
adventure fiction under parodied names fought a giant showdown that left them
all dead.
An
allusion to Doc Savage was made in Farmer’s translation of J. H. Rosny’s Ironcastle
when it was mentioned that Clark Savage senior had designed some guns for
Ironcastle.
Doc
Savage appeared in two more of Farmer’s published works in disguise. In The
Savage Shadow Doc and his cohorts appear as the alcoholic inmates of a sanitarium;
what we would call a rehab clinic today. Author Kenneth Robeson is the main
character of the story. The story is one of Farmer’s fictional author series,
this one purportedly written by Maxwell Grant, the writer of The Shadow series.
The story is meant to be Grant’s joking version of how Robeson came up with the
idea for Doc Savage and his fabulous five. Other stories were planned by which
Robeson and Grant would use version of each others characters in a variety of
ways. However this was the only one published.
A
disguised version of Doc Savage appeared in Philip José Farmer’s A
Barnstormer in Oz in which one of the diminutive inhabitants of Oz named
Sharts the Shirtless was a physical look a like of Doc Savage. The same size as
Dorothy’s son Hank Stover, Sharts was a physical giant compared to the rest of
Oz. Like Doc, Sharts was also a genius although he did not possess Doc Savage’s
sense of morality. Sharts earned his name because he could not wear the
clothing that would fit most inhabitants of Oz. It was also a tribute to the
Bama covers of the Bantam Doc Savage series wherein Doc Savage was shown with a
ripped shirt. Sharts’ constant companion was Blogo the Rare
Beast, an apish humanoid that seemed to be this Oz’ version of Monk Mayfair.
Why Doc
Savage did not make more appearances in Farmer’s work I cannot say for certain.
It may be that Farmer was saving Doc for some of his major works which
unfortunately remained either unpublished or unfinished. He wrote Doc Savage
and the Cult of the Blue God, a screenplay for the second Doc Savage film which
never came to fruition since the first one had bombed. He also began Monster
On Hold which was to be another Doc Caliban novel.
Another Doc Savage inspired property which Farmer unfinished, but which was
completed in collaboration with Win Scott Eckert was The Evil of Pemberley
House and published in 2009. This novel is about Doc Savage’s daughter, or
at least the one postulated in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.
The last
member of Philip José Farmer’s pulp trinity was The Shadow. Like Doc Savage the
Shadow’s appearances were for the most part actual cameos or disguised
appearances. Farmer made the Shadow, or rather Kent Allard a member of the Wold
Newton Family that included Tarzan and Doc Savage. However he at first claimed
that the Shadow, The Spider and G-8 were all one person with a multiple
personality disorder. Farmer altered that theory for Doc Savage His
Apocalyptic Life so that these three individuals were brothers rather than
the same man.
The first
cameo appearance by the Shadow appears to have been in “After King Kong Fell”.
He makes
a more substantial cameo in The Adventure of the Peerless Peer. As a WW
I aviator he encountered and saved the lives of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
In the revised version of the novel, The Adventure of the Three Madmen,
he is one of the madmen in question.
The
Shadow makes a disguised appearance in “Greatheart Silver in Showdown at
Shootout” as Phwombly an old detective who teaches Greatheart Silver. He is
among those who travel to and perish at Shootout. The character of Phwombly
also appears in The New York Review of Bird, a story written by Harlan Ellison
which was in the same issue of Weird Heroes as “Greatheart Silver in Showdown
at Shootout” This story bears mentioning because as Ellison explains in his after
word to the story, Philip José Farmer had a lot of influence on story since
Ellison based much of the back story on Farmer’s genealogies in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.
Ellison’s version of Phwombly however had different version of the relationship
between Margo and Kent Allard.
Although The Savage Shadow does not have a cameo
by The Shadow, it was certainly influenced by him. Although it is a story about
Kenneth Robeson as written by Maxwell Grant there is also a reference to the
Shadow series with the female lead Burke being related to the Shadow’s agent
Clyde Burke.
The last
actual appearance of the Shadow in Farmer’s works was in a cameo in “The Long Wet Dream of Rip Van Winkle”.
Van Winkle wakes up in the 1930’s and encounters
The
Shadow’s influence on Philip José Farmer was also evident by Farmer’s story “Skinburn”. This introduced the private detective
The
Pulp Trinity Chronology of appearances
1968 “The
Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod” 1968 (Tarzan)
1969 A Feast Unknown (Doc
Savage, Tarzan)
1970 Lord Tyger (Tarzan)
1970 Lord of the Trees/Mad Goblin (Tarzan Doc
Savage)
1972 Tarzan Alive (Tarzan, Doc Savage, Shadow)
1972 Times Last Gift (Tarzan
)
1972 “Skinburn” (Shadow)
1973 Doc Savage His Apocalyptic Life (Tarzan,
Doc Savage, Shadow)
1973 “After
King Kong Fell” (Doc Savage) Shadow and
1974Adventure of the Peerless Peer (Tarzan,
Shadow)
1974 Hadon
of Ancient Opar (Tarzan)
1974 “Extracts
from the Memoirs of "Lord Greystoke"
1975 Greatheart Silver (Shadow) (Doc Savage
sort of)
1975 Ironcastle (Doc Savage, Shadow)
1976 Flight to Opar (Tarzan)
1977 “Savage
Shadow” (Doc Savage) (Shadow”
1981 “Long
Wet Dream of Rip Van Winkle” (Shadow)
1982 A Barnstormer in Oz (Doc
Savage and Monk)
1984 “Adventure
of the Three Madmen” (Shadow)
1991 Escape
From Loki (Doc Savage – Tarzan reference)
1999 Dark
Heart of Time (Tarzan)