The Apes of Wrath

by Richard Klaw

  Not every fictional primate following Darwin was used to comment on Darwin: L. D. Nichols’ “Sam’s Monkey” (1867) is a straightforward tale of a pet monkey destroying a household, Élie Berthet’s The Wild Man of the Woods (1868) is an adventure tale with a number of similarities to Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, and the monkey in J. S. Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” (1869) is either hallucinatory or demonic. But through the 1860s and 1870s primates were used often enough as a comment on evolution that William Allingham spoke for many with his poem “How Man is like to Ape we have now heard enough and to spare” (1884).

  During this time period three separate developments appeared which would permanently affect how apes were portrayed in literature.

  The first was Modernism. As a literary and cultural movement reacting to a widely perceived cultural malaise, Modernism was full of ambivalence about culture in general. One element Modernism was ambivalent about and even hostile to was science and its efforts to understand the universe. Modernism was equally concerned with what it saw as the evils of progress and the destructiveness of science.

  Modernism most often manifested itself in high art and the avant-garde, but during the first half of the twentieth century there was a discernible stream of influence, deliberate and otherwise, on creators of low art. And with the widespread use of primates in popular culture (see below) it was inevitable that modernist ape stories would be told.

  As early as 1886, in Émile Dodillon’s Hemo, the scientific attempt to improve the “blood-line” of humanity through the use of “strong ancestral stock”—a response to Sir Francis Galton’s theories on eugenics—is treated with Modernist contempt, and the attempt ends in bestiality, homicide, and suicide. In Frank Constable’s The Curse of Intellect (1895), teaching a monkey how to speak English and interact with humans socially causes the ape, and its teacher, nothing but misery and bitterness. In Leopoldo Lugones’ “Yzur” (1906), the attempt to teach an ape sign language exposes the narrator’s cruelty. And in Ilya Selvinksy’s play Pao-Pao (1933) giving the titular orangutan the power of speech through a brain transplant only convinces Pao-Pao of the truth of nihilism.

  The second was anthropology. Although the study of the origins, development, and customs of human societies began in the eighteenth century with Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, anthropology began to develop as a separate academic discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century, and what might be thought of as an anthropological approach to primates began to appear in fiction. Henry Curwen’s Zit and Xoe (1886) examines how two advanced apes, Zit and Xoe, are ostracized by ape society and how they make their own. Willy Speyer’s “Bobbi the Chimp” (1909) shows how an ape brought into society clashes with human society’s rules and is ultimately ostracized. And Yevgeni Zamyatin’s play Afrikanskii Gost’ (1929–1930) mixed anthropology and Soviet science in its story of the proper conversion of an African ape to Soviet Communism.

  But the third and largest major development was the creation of modern popular fiction and especially genre fiction. As modern popular fiction and genre fiction evolved from preceding forms in the nineteenth century, its writers seized on previously existing motifs and images for use. One of these was primates, who proved to be a reliable standby until the middle of the twentieth century.

  An exhaustive list of primates in modern fiction is far beyond the limits of this essay, so instead I will cover a few of the highlights in some of the major genres.

  Examples in adventure fiction are numerous and obvious. In Westerns, two typical examples appeared in the German pulp Reo Ratt - Im Kampf Gegen List und Gewalt in 1924 and in the English story paper Wizard in 1939. In Reo Ratt the titular German cowboy hero pursues Kaku, an ape trained by a gang of thieves to hold up stagecoaches. In Wizard a serial, “Six Gun Gorilla,” ran over several months; the serial was about O’Neil, a gun-slinging gorilla whose owner is killed and who pursues the killers across the Old West.

  In mysteries, when primates appeared, they were in the mode of the orangutan of “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” but occasionally more unusual variations appeared. Primate detectives occasionally appear in modern comic books, but the first was Jacko the Detective, who appeared in an English story paper from 1911 to 1917. Jacko was the assistant and chauffeur to a Willoughby Homes, a Sherlock Holmesian Great Detective, and occasionally Jacko would solve cases on his own.

  Primates were often used in science fiction, primarily as monsters or henchmen, but occasionally in more interesting ways. In the pseudonymously published “The Upper Hand” (1894), set in 1993, apes have taken over the world and developed advanced technology, including a device for communicating with Mars. And in Marcel Roland’s “Gulluliou, ou, Le Presqu’homme” (1905), set in the twenty-fourth century, an attempt to integrate the titular superintelligent ape leads to love between the ape and a socialite.

  Primates were most commonly used in horror stories: as a jealous pet who murders his owner’s wife in Rudyard Kipling’s “Bertran and Bimi” (1891), as the crazed result of a Moreau-like mad scientist’s experiments in Epes Winthrop Sargent’s “Beyond the Banyans” (1909), and as inhabitants of a lost African city and the ancestor of the title character in H. P. Lovecraft’s “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (1921).

  Some political writers found primates to be useful symbols. The Polish writer Tadeusz Miciński, in his Nietota (1910) and Żywia Słoneczna (1912), the forces of good and evil clash, good being represented by the holy warrior Ariaman and evil being represented by the demonic ape de Mangro and his ally, the “sultan of souls,” Pope Pius X. And in response to the Japanese invasion during World War Two the Kids’ Theatre of Shanghai put on the play The Gorilla King (1941?), a retelling of Journey to the West but one in which China is invaded by a group of conspicuously unnamed invaders, leading Sun Wukong, who is actually King Kong, to swim to China from Skull Island and liberate China.

  Internationally, primates were as common in popular fiction as they were in the West: in Japan, in Kaita Murayama’s “Maenden” (1915), a retelling of “Murders in the Rue Morgue” set in contemporary Tokyo and featuring a superpowered gorilla; in Spain, in Jesús de Aragón’s Los Piratas del Aire (1929), as the pilot of the Yellow Peril’s war-zeppelin; and in Portugal, in Reinaldo Ferreira’s Aventuras Extraordinarias do Mosqueteiro do Ar (1933), as the assassins of the international crime syndicate Trust Z.

  Primates were common in twentieth-century popular literature, but only a handful of works with primates achieved iconic status, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, whose hundreds of appearances began with the twenty-four novels and story collections written by Burroughs beginning in 1912. Although there were numerous influences on Burroughs, most notably Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), Burroughs succeeded in creating the most famous and enduring character from the American pulps and one of the archetypal characters of twentieth-century popular literature, as well as one of the two most imitated characters in global popular fiction. (Sherlock Holmes is the first.) An inextricable part of Tarzan’s adventures are the mangani, the intelligent apes who helped raise him and so imprinted themselves on him that he is known, not as “Tarzan,” but as “Tarzan the Ape Man.”

  Although the film King Kong was preceded by a magazine story version in late 1932, it was the 1933 film that became the primate-centric work of popular culture, and had the most impact on popular culture. King Kong has become the archetypal giant monster movie, and its primate protagonist has become a movie icon. Though clearly not based on any real species of primate, King Kong nonetheless remains the most famous ape in the world, and in the 2005 remake Kong became a sympathetic protagonist rather than simply a giant monster.

  In 1941 German Jews H. A. and Margret Rey, who had fled Europe because of the Nazis, published Curious George, the first of seven children’s books the Reys wrote about a well-meaning, childlike chimpanzee. Like King Kong, Curious George become iconic, but in a much differ
ent fashion: through international translations, television shows, movies, and generations of children readers, George became the iconic friendly primate and ideal fantasy pal for children.

  The shift to visual culture in the 1950s led to the next two iconic primate characters appearing in visual media rather than in prose. The 1959 debut of John Broome’s Gorilla Grodd, in the comic book The Flash, gave the world the archetypal hostile, intelligent primate. Grodd has been a recurring character in superhero comics since his debut, and arguably every hostile talking primate since then has been, to some degree, an imitation of Grodd.

  Like King Kong, the Planet of the Apes franchise began in print, in a 1963 novel, La Planète des Singes, by French author Pierre Boulle. But like King Kong far more people were exposed to the film version of the novel than to the novel itself. In all, seven films and two television series were made based (however lightly) on Boulle’s novel, in the process creating the most iconic post-apocalyptic world and the best-known world, in which apes, not humanity, are the rulers.

  Finally, Will Self’s novel Great Apes (1997), a satire about a world in which chimpanzees and humans have switched places, was critically acclaimed and remains popular. But Great Apes’ real importance was in establishing the idea that a novel about intelligent primates could be treated seriously by critics and even achieve canonical status. The 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, though superficially belonging to the Planet of the Apes franchise, is far more serious than the previous films, and the result is far closer to Great Apes than to the earlier films in its portrayal of simian psychology.

  After 1500 years apes are finally being treated seriously in high culture. As apes achieve more legal rights in Western civilization, this trend will only continue and accelerate.

  TARZAN’S

  FIRST LOVE

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Burroughs tackles the thorny topic of Tarzan’s adolescence when the future Jungle Lord attempts to woo Teeka, a female ape. The outcome forces the young man to confront his genetic distance from his animal brethren.

  Teeka, stretched at luxurious ease in the shade of the tropical forest, presented, unquestionably, a most alluring picture of young, feminine loveliness. Or at least so thought Tarzan of the Apes, who squatted upon a low-swinging branch in a near-by tree and looked down upon her.

  Just to have seen him there, lolling upon the swaying bough of the jungle-forest giant, his brown skin mottled by the brilliant equatorial sunlight which percolated through the leafy canopy of green above him, his clean-limbed body relaxed in graceful ease, his shapely head partly turned in contemplative absorption and his intelligent, gray eyes dreamily devouring the object of their devotion, you would have thought him the reincarnation of some demigod of old.

  You would not have guessed that in infancy he had suckled at the breast of a hideous, hairy she-ape, nor that in all his conscious past since his parents had passed away in the little cabin by the landlocked harbor at the jungle’s verge, he had known no other associates than the sullen bulls and the snarling cows of the tribe of Kerchak, the great ape.

  Nor, could you have read the thoughts which passed through that active, healthy brain, the longings and desires and aspirations which the sight of Teeka inspired, would you have been any more inclined to give credence to the reality of the origin of the ape-man. For, from his thoughts alone, you could never have gleaned the truth—that he had been born to a gentle English lady or that his sire had been an English nobleman of time-honored lineage.

  Lost to Tarzan of the Apes was the truth of his origin. That he was John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, with a seat in the House of Lords, he did not know, nor, knowing, would have understood.

  Yes, Teeka was indeed beautiful!

  Of course Kala had been beautiful—one’s mother is always that—but Teeka was beautiful in a way all her own, an indescribable sort of way which Tarzan was just beginning to sense in a rather vague and hazy manner.

  For years had Tarzan and Teeka been play-fellows, and Teeka still continued to be playful while the young bulls of her own age were rapidly becoming surly and morose. Tarzan, if he gave the matter much thought at all, probably reasoned that his growing attachment for the young female could be easily accounted for by the fact that of the former playmates she and he alone retained any desire to frolic as of old.

  But today, as he sat gazing upon her, he found himself noting the beauties of Teeka’s form and features—something he never had done before, since none of them had aught to do with Teeka’s ability to race nimbly through the lower terraces of the forest in the primitive games of tag and hide-and-go-seek which Tarzan’s fertile brain evolved. Tarzan scratched his head, running his fingers deep into the shock of black hair which framed his shapely, boyish face—he scratched his head and sighed. Teeka’s new-found beauty became as suddenly his despair. He envied her the handsome coat of hair which covered her body. His own smooth, brown hide he hated with a hatred born of disgust and contempt. Years back he had harbored a hope that some day he, too, would be clothed in hair as were all his brothers and sisters; but of late he had been forced to abandon the delectable dream.

  Then there were Teeka’s great teeth, not so large as the males, of course, but still mighty, handsome things by comparison with Tarzan’s feeble white ones. And her beetling brows, and broad, flat nose, and her mouth! Tarzan had often practiced making his mouth into a little round circle and then puffing out his cheeks while he winked his eyes rapidly; but he felt that he could never do it in the same cute and irresistible way in which Teeka did it.

  And as he watched her that afternoon, and wondered, a young bull ape who had been lazily foraging for food beneath the damp, matted carpet of decaying vegetation at the roots of a near-by tree lumbered awkwardly in Teeka’s direction. The other apes of the tribe of Kerchak moved listlessly about or lolled restfully in the midday heat of the equatorial jungle. From time to time one or another of them had passed close to Teeka, and Tarzan had been uninterested. Why was it then that his brows contracted and his muscles tensed as he saw Taug pause beside the young she and then squat down close to her?

  Tarzan always had liked Taug. Since childhood they had romped together. Side by side they had squatted near the water, their quick, strong fingers ready to leap forth and seize Pisah, the fish, should that wary denizen of the cool depths dart surfaceward to the lure of the insects Tarzan tossed upon the face of the pool.

  Together they had baited Tublat and teased Numa, the lion. Why, then, should Tarzan feel the rise of the short hairs at the nape of his neck merely because Taug sat close to Teeka?

  It is true that Taug was no longer the frolicsome ape of yesterday. When his snarling-muscles bared his giant fangs no one could longer imagine that Taug was in as playful a mood as when he and Tarzan had rolled upon the turf in mimic battle. The Taug of today was a huge, sullen bull ape, somber and forbidding. Yet he and Tarzan never had quarreled.

  For a few minutes the young ape-man watched Taug press closer to Teeka. He saw the rough caress of the huge paw as it stroked the sleek shoulder of the she, and then Tarzan of the Apes slipped catlike to the ground and approached the two.

  As he came his upper lip curled into a snarl, exposing his fighting fangs, and a deep growl rumbled from his cavernous chest. Taug looked up, batting his blood-shot eyes. Teeka half raised herself and looked at Tarzan. Did she guess the cause of his perturbation? Who may say? At any rate, she was feminine, and so she reached up and scratched Taug behind one of his small, flat ears.

  Tarzan saw, and in the instant that he saw, Teeka was no longer the little playmate of an hour ago; instead she was a wondrous thing—the most wondrous in the world—and a possession for which Tarzan would fight to the death against Taug or any other who dared question his right of proprietorship.

  Stooped, his muscles rigid and one great shoulder turned toward the young bull, Tarzan of the Apes sidled nearer and nearer. His face was partly averted, but his keen gray eyes never left thos
e of Taug, and as he came, his growls increased in depth and volume.

  Taug rose upon his short legs, bristling. His fighting fangs were bared. He, too, sidled, stiff-legged, and growled.

  “Teeka is Tarzan’s,” said the ape-man, in the low gutturals of the great anthropoids.

  “Teeka is Taug’s,” replied the bull ape.

  Thaka and Numgo and Gunto, disturbed by the growlings of the two young bulls, looked up half apathetic, half interested. They were sleepy, but they sensed a fight. It would break the monotony of the humdrum jungle life they led.

  Coiled about his shoulders was Tarzan’s long grass rope, in his hand was the hunting knife of the long-dead father he had never known. In Taug’s little brain lay a great respect for the shiny bit of sharp metal which the ape-boy knew so well how to use. With it had he slain Tublat, his fierce foster father, and Bolgani, the gorilla. Taug knew these things, and so he came warily, circling about Tarzan in search of an opening. The latter, made cautious because of his lesser bulk and the inferiority of his natural armament, followed similar tactics.

  For a time it seemed that the altercation would follow the way of the majority of such differences between members of the tribe and that one of them would finally lose interest and wander off to prosecute some other line of endeavor. Such might have been the end of it had the casus belli been other than it was; but Teeka was flattered at the attention that was being drawn to her and by the fact that these two young bulls were contemplating battle on her account. Such a thing never before had occurred in Teeka’s brief life. She had seen other bulls battling for other and older shes, and in the depth of her wild little heart she had longed for the day when the jungle grasses would be reddened with the blood of mortal combat for her fair sake.