The other day, I came across the anthology The Pulps. Edited by Tony Goodstone and published in 1970, it is a nostalgic look back at the heyday of pulp magazines in the 1910s through the 1950s. I thought it might be worthwhile to discuss each of the stories it contains, one at a time.
The Pulps is an oversized hardback designed to have dimensions roughly similar to a pulp magazine. In addition to a collection of stories (chosen to be representative rather than for quality, Goodstone tells us), it contains a smattering of vintage ads and excerpts from letters to the editor and other back matter. The presentation of the stories preverves illustrations and mimics original layouts, though the font has obviously been standardized and modernized. The book also contains a collection of full-color magazine covers.
The Pulps features a decent explanatory apparatus. An introductory essay traces the history of pulp fiction, arguing that it has its origins in the moralizing chapbooks of the 1840s. The book is then divided into sections dedicated to adventure, sports, war, westerns, detectives, and so forth. The book offers one great disappointment: Toward its end is an essay about The Shadow and Doc Savage, but it contains stories of neither.
I’ll take these stories one at a time, in the order presented.
The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw
Unsurprisingly, the book opens with a big name, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Author of numerous works, his most famous are A Princess of Mars and of course Tarzan of the Apes. The short story “The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw,” from 1937, features a protagonist superficially similar to Burroughs’s other Herculean heroes but ultimately rather lacking.
Summary
The titular Jimber-Jaw is a man from “50,000 B.C.” who was flash-frozen during an ice storm in what is now Siberia. A pilot and a scientist working in cryopreservation discover him by chance when a rainstorm washes away a stream bank, and they successfully bring him back to life. A six-foot, muscular Adonis, Jimber-Jaw is a man out of time who cannot comprehend modern ways, though he learns English speedily and fits in very well for all that. The pilot takes him to America and sets him up first as a wrestler and then as a boxer, and the two make considerable money thanks to Jimber-Jaw’s enormous strength.
For his part, Jimber-Jaw is less interested in fighting than in finding a woman named Lilami, whom he was to marry before the ice storm sealed his fate. Lilami is, of course, several thousand years gone, but Jimber-Jaw cannot comprehend that and insists that a certain actress, Lorna Downs, is his lost love.
Jimber-Jaw is generally unimpressed with modern women. As he says, “They are no different from men. The men smoke; the women smoke. The men drink; the women drink. The men swear; the women swear. They gamble—they tell dirty stories—the are out all night and cannot be fit to look after the caves and the children the next day. They are only good for one thing, otherwise they might as well be men. … In my country such women are killed.”
He insists that Lorna must be different, but the reader can easily guess that he is in for a disappointment.
Commentary
Jimber-Jaw is the noble savage, a man ostensibly from outside civilization who observes civilization and pronounces judgment on it. Among pulp heroes, Conan the Cimmerian is the most famous of this type, but Jimber-Jaw’s character arc is mostly reminiscent of John the Savage from Huxley’s Brave New World. John likewise idolizes a woman only to find out that she is far too modern in her behavior. He and Jimber-Jaw even comes to a similar end, though Jimber-Jaw is less operatic about it.
The common deficiency of these sorts of noble savage stories, and “Jimber-Jaw” is no exception, is that the viewpoint of the savage is not so foreign as it pretends to be. As Huxley later admitted, John is too erudite to be convincing. Similarly, the aforementioned Conan condemns atrocities, such as child-trafficking, at which no true red-handed barbarian would bat an eyelash. And aside from some cartoonish flourishes about killing women or dragging them by their hair, Jimber-Jaw’s commentary could come from any man exasperated with decadence. There’s nothing truly alien in his thoughts, nothing that really shocks our sensibilities the way a man from more than fifty thousand years in the past undoubtedly would.
But the real disappointment in “Jimber-Jaw” is not the idealized primitive protagonist but the lack of action. Burroughs is known for his fast pace and constant fighting, but “Jimber-Jaw” is surprisingly low-key. The magazine that published this story (Argosy) sets up our expectations with this tagline: “Back from the Stone Age, from 50,000 B.C., came Jimber-Jaw the Mighty to find his mate and battle his fate—fist and fang against our world of science.” That suggests a loincloth-clad Hercules taking up a jawbone like Samson and bludgeoning a mad scientist’s army of robots, but nothing like that happens. Fists have a small role in the story, but fangs do not appear at all. And rather than fighting a world of science, Jimber-Jaw mostly makes biting comments about the world of Hollywood.
