ME TARZAN, YOU JANE

...He was an upstart, who, learning to write, shaped a modern myth...

...Hardly...

...We know, too, he was a writer who had an orgiastic need to write, to shape a dream in a wry form of storytelling that is not simply literature, but is the poetic fantasy of fable and folklore...

...At a given point Porges drops his objective stance, and ceases to address his subject in the third person singular...

...Since this film is a character study rather than a philosophical inquiry of Resnais's own, it has to remain true to Clive's mental state...

...There is something about this book that is like a Cubist collage...

...They too, Studs Lonigan and his gang, were genuine Americans...

...And that is why, perhaps, Burroughs was so misunderstood, denied and rejected...

...For much of the film he makes his dead wife into his son's mistress, and once or twice he even rewrites scenes whose implications displease him...

...This is why Providence turn~ out to be a lesser film than Hiroshima or Muriel...

...Thus is the entire film imprisoned in Clive's mind, subject not only to his fantasizing, but to the lapses that pain and old age are causing him as well...

...We do not learn what subterranean forces worked on this mundane, prosaic man, Burroughs, to make him write the golden legend of the autochthonous jungle god, the modern epic myth of the daemonic Tarzan, Lord o/ the Jungle...

...Yet this creation is contemporaneous with every man's secret desire to be liberated from frustration and despair...

...In this welter of material Porges was determined to uncover the real flesh-andblood man who had somehow got-ten lost in the world's adulation of the exalted, mythic superhero: Tarzan, the Lord of the Jungle...

...In Rogerson at Bay, the forty-sevenyear-old .hero is advised by his doctor that if he does not 'have himself circumcized, he faces a risk of skin cancer in his old age...

...The account begins: "I am sorry that I have not led a more exciting existence . . . but I am one of those fellows who has few adventures and always gets to the fire after it is out...

...And thus the inevitable questions, again: What kind of man is this...

...Does this mean, deep underneath, unconsciously, that Burroughs tends to be what Tarzan is, forever young, forever an adolescent...

...Men turn into werewolves, a cadaver is dissected, white wine is drunk almost continuously--but none of these things ever really acquires any meaning...

...Like everything else in the film, as they are part of the personality of one character, they are essentially histrionic rather than symbolic in nature...

...and writing, shaped himself...

...It is narrative pantomime, dramaturgic fiction...

...Clive is an engaging old curmudgeon, a genuine dramatic tour de force...

...that he was kidnapped by gypsies...

...but since he isn't remembering that event so much as trying to imagine its emotional consequences to other people, he is free to manipulate their lives in his mind...

...The sort of aesthetic ordering which disclosed meaning within the confusion and made past Resnais films great is here inappropriate...

...But in both areas his fiction is remarkable for its subtle humor, ease of description, nuance of psychological analysis and warm human sympathy for the individual overwhelmed by circumstances or events in a dramatically changing world...

...cavalryman, cowhand, gold miner, farmer, railroad cop (who tried to enlist with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders ) --the while on his way to becoming America's highest paid author and millionaire owner of Tarzana Ranch...

...In these novels McInerny deals more directly with ~he sacred than the secular and writes in a higher style than in the Rogerson novels...

...And then among the younger writers Tom McHale has recently published his fourth novel in about a halfdozen years, George V. Higgins gives us a novel a year, and the as yet hrgely unheralded but potentially important Thomas Fleming also wl"ites' about one book a year, alternating volumes of American history with his series of novels an.alyzing the Jersey City Irish...

...Mclnerny is a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame University who has published works of substance in the history of medieval philosophy...

...that he lived in the Forbidden City until he was ten years old...

...Porges shifts his ground, and the conceptual determination to uncover the real man blurs...

...and the book, instead of a monument of great power eliciting the insight to a major, mythopoeic mind and its decline, becomes, instead, a monumental, uncritical assemblage, an olio, of a kind...

...For one thing, Porges never let us know that Burroughs (Ed, of course) has touched a raw nerve in his own unconscious that is linked to the elemental magma of the universal mythological stuff from which all ideal heroes spring...

...Here the point is for the flow of associations to be truly free and rambling...

...but no topological, physiographic excitement, no sense of drama...

...it is a kind of metaliterature that doesn't fall into the conceived pattern of formal fiction...

...his own--an aesthetic order which approached events obliquely because it approached meaning and feeling more directly, and thereby compensated us for any confusion or disorientation it caused...

...Like Farrell, McInerny is at home in the ,heartland of America, vchose people he knows well...

...Why should the creator of Tarzan, whose fantasy brain-child is the very essence of undaunted assertiveness and manliness, be such a classic Timid Soul, a Walter Mitty, a Charlie Brown...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...As a result, Clive Langham's thoughts are, though driven by guilt like those of characters in earlier Resnais films, not straitened by inalterable events the way memories are...

...Rogerson at Bay (1976), McInerny's fif.th novel, continues the life journey of Professor Matchew Rogerson, a rather inept but essentially decent humanities teacher at a state university somewhere in the midwest, vrhom we first met in Jolly Rogerson (1967), McInerny's first novel...

...it hangs together in a series of adjoining planes, like mosaic pieces or vignettes that have no central theme or governing structure...

...Burroughs, in truth, wrote mythology...

...and Tarzan is the dream child of ERB's own fitful yearning...

...Does Porges deal with this...

...Later that summer, when a younger, liberated, female faculty colleague invites him over for some free love, he 18 March 1977:184...

...Similarly, where society, the collective and public experience, has real counterweight to individual, private experience in Hiroshima, in Providence the decline of civilization into martial law against which the story is played out can be understood only as a correspondence for the deteriorating health of the film's lone, all-consuming character, Clive...

...We never get into the depth of Burrough's mind and heart...

...The texture, the tension and the tautness are slack and loosely-knit in the chronological indiscriminate unfolding of events...

...In giving us ,his fourth and fifth novels since 1967, Ralph Mclnerny inscribes his name in a tradition ~h~t includes James T. Faxrel, who recently published his fiftieth book, John O'Hara, Eugene O'Neill and even F. Scott Fitzgerald...

...But Resnais's film-making was far superior in the days when he and his own thoughts were the unseen protagonist of his films...

...But then we learn that ,he was born "in Peking at the time my father was military advisor to the Empress of China...

...instead, we get a table of accounts, records of words written, pages not published, statements of earnings, quibbles over rights, quarrels with editors, pt~blishers, motion picture producers, advances and retreats--not once or twice, but repeatedly, over the years...

...For instance, when asked to write an autobiographical sketch for a magazine, he cannot bring himself to spell out some straight facts, though his fame (1932) is worldwide...

...Nevertheless, there are times when Porges's book is enormously intriguing...

...In Porges's work we get a string of banal attitudes --Burroughs was annoyed, irritated...

...Burroughs, or Edgar Rice Burroughs, disappears from the text reference and Ed appears, subtly linked in a consanguine rel,ationship to Porges's psyche From this point on, the critical detachment loosens...

...There was a warehouse full of material--records, journals, correspondence, and almost uncountable pieces of memorabilia dating back to the turn of the century...

...And that state is, though facile and often amusing, also unstable to say the least...

...The book as mission and biography becomes vuluera'ble...

...With Burroughs the act of creation is sublimely innocent...

...Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan IRWIN PORGES Brigham University Press, $19.95 When Irwin Porges set out to write Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan, he admits he had "no concept of the complexity of the project" he had undertaken...

...He thus quietly arranges to have the operation performed while his wife Marge, now a lapsed Catholic (Rogerson himself is a rather scrupulous and somewhat Jansenistic Protestant who had agreed to marry in the Catholic Churoh), is off on vazation...

...Similarly, we learn that Burroughs was shy, deeply sensitive, terribly selfconscious--as, for instance, over his baldness (hence he was almost never without a hat) and over his uneven front teeth (hence fingers constantly covered mouth...

...for even as Tarzan is the anti-hero and the orphan of his three lost worlds--his personal world, his jungle world, his civilized world--so is 18 March 1977:182 Burroughs the anti-hero and the orphan-and so is every man...

...It is an assemblage, a sequence of chronological documentation whose compelling concern is detail and corpuscular minutiae like the colorful conjunctures of a map--an interesting, arresting surface...

...If the latter had not lost his will to live and consumed himself in self-hatred, there is reason to believe ~hat he too would have been as prolific as O'Hara and O'Neill...

...The suicide of Clive's wife (Elaine Stritch) does loom large in his mind...

...Or, to probe deeper ground, what does it mean that the figure of Tarzan Commonweal: 183 is an avatar of eternal youth, that in a mythic sense the Lord of the Jungle matures, but never grows up...

...Burroughs, it seems, had a lifelong feeling of inferiority...

...But Providence is not about the past nor about memory...

...Also, like Farre$1, but unlike O'Hara and Fitzgerald of that generation, McInerny feels no guilt, no inferiority about being Irish...

...He is always selfdeprecating, sometimes humorously sometimes seriously...

...What of that side of him that wishes to divert attention and that indulges in ,pseudonyms...

...that he had been a U.S...

...the result is less than the goal...

...In .this sense, a Mclnerny would be inconceivable wi.thout a Farrell, for the Satter was really the first American Irish writer to boldly declare that the charaoters who populated his own world - - t h e poolrooms and street corners, the barrooms, barber shops and .paroohial schools of Chicago's Indiana Avenue-could become the legitimate stuff of important American fiction...

...he displays sarcasm, anger...

...Gate of Heaven RALPH MclNERNY Harper & Row, $8.95 ROGERSON AT BAY RALPH McINERNY Harper & Row, $8.95 DAVID O'CONNELL American Irish writers tend to be endowed with energy...

...In his writings, even in the biographical data Burroughs himself had sketched from time to time, the author had emerged...

...For, even at the very end, he mistrusted his talents, disparaged his accomplishments, denigrated his education, and denied his value and place even in the face of great rewards, because he felt small against other writers, whose accomplishments and distinctions were immeasurably less than his...

...Gate of Heaven, published last year, was his fourth novel and i~ shares with A Narrow Time (1969) and The Priest (1973) the author's concern for chronicling social and spiritual developments in the post-conciliar Church...

...He was an important writer, and was great in his way, though he never knew it...

...Is it sufficient to say that Burroughs is self-effacing because he has a "horror of notoriety...

...Here it is not only the reality that is interior, but the view of reality as well...

...Porges sets after the man...

...But then there is his fictional world, divided into two parts, and each of the novels considered here represents a face of that dichotomized universe...

...It's about providence, about the future and speculation, fancy, rather than memory...

...Consequently, much of the imagery in the film seems at last to be purely gestural rather than thematic...

...Incredibly, to our day not one book length study of FarreU exists--an unfortunate state of affairs indeed, for serious reconsideration of the work of this 1930s antiStalinist leftist might well show .that he should be ranked right behind O'Neill, our greatest playwright, and Fitzgerald, possibly our greatest novelist...

...We know Edgar Rice Burroughs was a loser and a loner...

...He came a great way, like a long distance swimmer, through a sea of troubles...