i'm afraid you misquoted me. i wrote that elswhere someone said that umslopogaas can be viewed as a black conan. i accept that this observation in itself is wrong but as for myself i could never say that umslopogaas is a black conan simply because umslopogaas first appeared in print in 1886 in haggard's "allan quatermain" which was about 40 years before conan.
rider haggard's influence also extends to edgar rice burroughs, and the solomon kane story "moon of skulls" also by howard, though the variation on haggard's "she"| in that story is much darker.
With respect, I fear you have misinterpreted my meaning. I was simply trying to qualify
your quote that "Conan is a black Umslopogaas". My point being that, whatever else Conan may be, he is not black. The origin of that misapprehension is neither here nor there to me.
I'm more interested by your contention that Haggard influenced Burroughs. My own preference would be for a much stronger qualifier than that; something along the lines of Haggard being systematically plagiarized, pirated, stolen from, copied and blatantly ripped off by Burroughs. And nor was he alone in being targetted for this treatment. Burroughs was a literary vulture who never had an original idea in his life. Although I will concede that he was very adept at elaborating and extemporizing upon the inventiveness of others.
This in itself is not quite as condemnatory as it may sound.
Its worth making the point that Burroughs began publishing at the fag end of what is sometimes referred to as the Age of Storytellers. This was a golden period of literary innovation that extended between the publication of
TREASURE ISLAND in 1883 and the outbreak of the First World War. It was from this time that posterity took possession of everything from Peter Pan to Fu Manchu, the Psammead to Sexton Blake, taking in such diverse icons as Dracula, Raffles, Jekyll & Hyde and Billy Bunter along the way, to name but a few. Such was the richness of the literary workings of this period that much of the popular culture of our own time is built largely on them. Would there be a Batman without the Scarlet Pimpernel for example? Or a
C.S.I without Sherlock Holmes?
Inevitably there was a fair degree of literary blacksmithing at this time with writers finding their imaginations sparked by striking upon the anvil of a competitor's work. Kipling, for instance, cheerfully admitted that
THE JUNGLE BOOKS would never have been written had he not read Haggard's
NADA THE LILY. Similarly we may conclude that Jack London's
THE SEA-WOLF would not have appeared without the precedent of Kipling's own
CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS: Haggard's
ALLAN AND THE ICE GODS without London's
BEFORE ADAM: London's
THE STAR ROVER without Kipling's "The Finest Story in the World". The examples are endless.
The thing is, all of the popular storytellers of this period appear to have cheerfully accepted this tendency as the validation of a good idea. Jack London, for instance, was blithely dismissive when accused of plagiarism. Similarly Kipling, in his autobiography
SOMETHING OF MYSELF, cautioned fellow writers to be tolerant of their copiers. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery after all. He singled out the author of
TARZAN OF THE APES (unable to quite bring himself to actually name him) as the "genius of the genii" when it came to his own batallion of flatterers.
To my mind what sets Burroughs apart is the sheer scale and scope of his literary plunderings. In this he has much in common with the much derided Lin Carter in that he appeared to flatter just about everyone. It is therefore all the more regrettable that Burroughs's heirs have not adopted the same sort of tolerance and leniency that earlier writers afforded to him. In the 1950s, for example, Marco Garon's entire Azan the Ape Man series was withdrawn and pulped at the insistence of the Burroughs estate for infringement of copyright. And to this day it remains equally draconian in the protection of its properties. The irony appears to be completely lost on them that - had he wished - Kipling would have been equally within his rights to demand the destruction of
TARZAN OF THE APES for the same reason. Edwin Arnold - author of
LT GULLIVAR JONES: HIS VACATION - had even more grounds to object to the entire Barsoom series. Conan Doyle had every reason to insist upon the withdrawal of
THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT. While, to get back to the original point, Haggard's heirs would have had a watertight case for arguing that Tarzan's lost civilisation infested Africa constituted intellectual theft on a massive scale.
Sadly we live in less forgiving times. Dare one make the point that a certain colossus of modern children's fiction is equally guilty of such rank hypocrisy?
