By Seamus Doyle
One of my strongest childhood memories is playing in the woods on the outskirts of town. We’d hang ropes from trees and pretend they were vines. Another rope was attached to the underside of a sturdy wooden bridge which spanned the small stream.
The bridge was about twenty feet above the stream. The stream itself was fifteen or twenty feet wide and was, fortunately, fairly shallow. Somehow, swinging across this mini-Amazon became a rite of passage.
What sticks in my mind most is that, somewhere in the proceedings, it became almost obligatory to beat your chest and shout ‘UMGOWA’ as you grabbed the rope and cast yourself into space.
A simple silent swing just didn’t seem appropriate, for we were all men of the jungle. We were all Tarzan.
Looking back, I have no idea if Johnny Weissmuller or any of the other screen Tarzans ever shouted ‘UMGOWA’, or even anything remotely like it, but it somehow found its way into our vocabulary.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was born into a fairly well-to-do family in Chicago in 1875. They could trace their American origins back to English settlers in the seventeenth century and were distantly related to America’s second president, John Adams.
His father and brothers were business-minded. In fact, his siblings were Yale graduates, but Edgar’s head was elsewhere and he showed no inclination for preparing himself for the world of pragmatic business.
Like many embryonic writers, Burroughs was something of a lost soul who simply couldn’t concentrate on things that were mundane. When he failed the entrance exam to the United States Military Academy at West Point, he joined the 7th Cavalry as a trooper, but he was soon discharged because of a heart defect.
He drifted from one dead-end job to another and even started several half-hearted, doomed-to-failure business ventures.
All the while, his mind conjured up tales of derring-do. His stories weren’t set on gritty city streets as many of his contemporaries did. Instead, he created the most unlikely locations in which his heroes could thrive.
His regular reading was fiction magazines, the quality of which was inconsistent, to say the least. He would later recall that the thought of the authors being paid for such rot spurred him to put some of those stories on paper and submit them for publication.
“I knew I could write something just as rotten and be paid just as much.”
The fiction journal All Story Magazine ran ‘A Princess on Mars’ in 1912, and quickly followed it with the first Tarzan tale the same year.
Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own
