No, But I’ve Read the Book

Since the days when Randolph of Roanoke tried to talk the Senate into outlawing the bowdlerized text of Shakespeare, such as high schools still use, American literacy in public places has drifted the other way. Now we have Tarzan tossed out of a California grade school, for living in sin with Jane. This happened over the Christmas holidays, and cries and countercries went up. Grosset and Dunlap assured the Republic that Lord Greystoke and Miss Jane Porter, of Baltimore, were married with full rites of the Church of England on page 313 of The Return of Tarzan, the second of the twelve-volume saga. The good folk of Downey, Calif., were thinking of Hollywood’s Tarzan.

In Burroughs’ pages, when Miss Porter met Tarzan formally— she had seen him previously when he rescued her from the attentions of the ape Terkoz, a suitor unacceptable to La Porter—he could read and write English (a trifle mushily), could speak “ape and a little elephant,” and French. By the sixth volume of the epic Tarzan speaks Arabic, English, German, Bantu, a great deal of elephant, Swahili, French, monkey, Middle English, lion, Abyssinian, and has a fair understanding of American. So it goes. Open your Frankenstein and hear the monster quoting Aeschylus; see him Byronizing over the sublimity of the Alps; look at the poor critter in Hollywood’s hands.

GD

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Guy Davenport

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Since the days when Randolph of Roanoke tried to talk the Senate into outlawing the bowdlerized text of Shakespeare, such as high schools still use, American literacy in public places has drifted the other way. Now we have Tarzan tossed out of a California grade school, for living in sin with Jane. This happened over the Christmas holidays, and cries and countercries went up. Grosset and Dunlap assured the Republic that Lord Greystoke and Miss Jane Porter, of Baltimore, were married with full rites of the Church of England on page 313 of The Return of Tarzan, the second of the twelve-volume saga. The good folk of Downey, Calif., were thinking of Hollywood’s Tarzan.

In Burroughs’ pages, when Miss Porter met Tarzan formally— she had seen him previously when he rescued her from the attentions of the ape Terkoz, a suitor unacceptable to La Porter—he could read and write English (a trifle mushily), could speak “ape and a little elephant,” and French. By the sixth volume of the epic Tarzan speaks Arabic, English, German, Bantu, a great deal of elephant, Swahili, French, monkey, Middle English, lion, Abyssinian, and has a fair understanding of American. So it goes. Open your Frankenstein and hear the monster quoting Aeschylus; see him Byronizing over the sublimity of the Alps; look at the poor critter in Hollywood’s hands.