The sensibilities that time forgot

So, I made a shopping blitz through Henderson Books the other week and grabbed a whole slug of stuff, including a copy of The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The paperback I bought was not graced with the old style cover art picture above; it was released to coincide with the film version of the story ("A major new motion picture!") in 1974. I have always had a soft spot for that cheesy, breezy Doug McClure flick, and thought I would check out the original, as it was a Burroughs I had never read in my glory days of cutting a reading swath through all things pulpish.

A bit of a shock it was.

The novel was originally published in 1918 and man, does it show. The typical ERB-ian adventure is there, all right; lots of excitement and derring-do to go around from a stalwart protagonist. But the casual racism and sexism, the unapologetic imperialist and colonialist attitudes, and a surprisingly robust anti-socialist/communist stance were real stumbling blocks to my enjoyment. There's lots of discussion about not judging something out of its own context, and I get that, sort of. But as many people have noted about Golden Age comics, sometimes it is just hard to read them. In point of fact, I didn't finish the book.

This response I had made me wonder about all the other ERB I had read as young man - Tarzan, of course, and the Barsoom novels, Pellucidar, and Carson of Venus. Are they as dated and problematic as this is? It was 45 years ago or more that I was reading them. Were the times so different then - was I so different then - that they were, and I just didn't notice?

I'm not sure I really want to find out; perhaps imperfect memory is a gift in this case.

But I do wonder about the "product of its time" argument. I am currently reading some of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries (two books from the same Henderson haul - one upstairs in living room and one downstairs on my nightstand). These were written in the early 1920s, and while some of the language and terminology may be a bit awkward, to say the least, there's a lot less stereotyping and bit more humanism present. Maybe that can straightforwardly be chalked up to a difference between Burroughs and Chesterton, but it takes some of the responsibility for the, ah, challenging characteristics of art away from "its time" and lays it at the feet of its author.

In any case, I am a little trepidatious about dipping back into another fave from my youth, Ernest Gann, but I'll give it a go. Twilight for the Gods was written in '56, so how bad can it be?