A Feast Unknown (35 page)

We find similar rebellion against all powerful authorities in several of Farmer’s works, such as the
World of Tiers
series, the
Riverworld
books,
The Lovers,
and
Dayworld.
Farmer rejected conformity and the claims of absolute power by one set of human beings over another. That is why so many of his books have Ragnarök—the death of the gods—as the ultimate solution to human problems.

This brings us to the Farmerian hero. As already noted, Farmer was distrustful of authority and its claims on the individual, especially when such authority claimed to be ancient,
venerable, and irresistible. It is no accident that the meeting room of the Nine is called “The Table of the Gods” and among the Nine are characters that seem to represent deities from various mythologies and religions. XauXaz represented Odin, the Father God of the Norse Pantheon. Anana was like the Mother Goddess of Wicca and other nature religions. Iwaldi was like the Trickster archetype found in Amerindian lore. And another member of the Nine was described as “a Hebrew born shortly before 1
AD
” who sounds suspiciously like Jesus.

Every Farmerian hero, from Peter Jairus Frigate, Sir Richard Francis Burton, and Samuel Clemens (the
Riverworld
series), to Two Hawks (
Two Hawks from Earth),
to Kickaha (the
World of Tiers
series), to Hadon (the
Khokarsa
series), to Jeff Caird (the
Dayworld
trilogy,) to John Gribardsun (
Time’s Last Gift),
is a skeptic and a rebel who is not bound by social convention and who eventually takes a moral stand against the powers that be.

The Farmerian hero is a man of personal integrity who stands up for what he believes and does what he thinks is necessary, even when it flies in the face of convention.

Lord Grandrith clearly has Farmer’s greatest sympathy in
Feast
because he is a human being unsullied by social mores. Doc Caliban is too inhibited by his civilized upbringing to be completely free until Grandrith “kills” him and he is “resurrected” to a new life as a rebel against the Nine.

Once again this is a theme that runs through virtually
all
of Farmer’s work.
Feast
is not an aberration in his oeuvre, but rather is typically Farmerian.

There are several things in
Feast
that remain somewhat shocking even today. For example, early on in the story, one of
the natives at Grandrith’s African estate rapes Grandrith’s pet dog as revenge against the animal’s master. Later, Grandrith speaks about coprophagia (the eating of animal droppings) as something he did to survive, alleging that zebra spoor was “almost relishable.” He also describes a long-standing sexual relationship with a female leopard named Kuta, who eventually broke it off with him because “I could not give her cubs.” And who could forget that climactic image of a naked Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban wrestling with each other on the narrow ledge leading to the lair of the Nine, with their erections crossing each other like swords
en garde?
I think these and some other references were intended to be a playful wink from Farmer, who was pulling our legs. There is one scene at the end where Grandrith finishes off the villain Noli by making a strategic cut around his rectum and throwing him across the room, pulling out twenty-four feet of intestine. While this makes an evocative image, it is anatomically absurd and ultimately humorous in a grisly sort of way. I guess Farmer thought as long as he was pushing the envelope of 1960s standards, he might as well have some fun with it.

But we should also recognize things like this actually do happen in the world. Bestiality, coprophagia, and drawing and quartering happen far more often than polite society wants to acknowledge. Philip José Farmer was well read in the dark side of human nature and in the practices of people in primitive cultures. While he may have had fun with his civilized readers, he was using horrific events that are not as uncommon as we would like to think.

Farmer also has Grandrith accidentally destroy a statue (i.e. a graven image) of Tarzan of the Apes that is being erected
in the British town of Greystoke during the climactic car chase at the end of
Feast.
I think this is another “wink” from Farmer letting us know he is deliberately destroying an idolized view of Tarzan with this story.

But we should not conclude he was just trashing Tarzan. Farmer grew up reading these stories and he would never do that. He was instead exploring the idea of the feral hero beyond the boundaries of our censorious and bourgeois imaginations. Grandrith is more like what a Tarzan would really be like. Doc Caliban, in his arrogance and lack of concern for others, is more like what a person bred to be a superman would become. In the end, Farmer loved these characters and redeemed them at a price. They needed to reassert their allegiance to personal moral integrity and stop being the standard bearers for the immortal secret elite who ruled the world from the depths of its past.

What no one knew in 1969 was that for several years Philip José Farmer had been doing research in Burke’s
Peerage,
trying to find the
real
Lord Greystoke. Farmer later claimed that he had done so and published a series of articles and a full-blown biography of the real jungle lord, called
Tarzan Alive.
¹
In that same book, he found links between the ape-man and Doc Savage, along with other adventure characters such as Wolf Larsen, Ned Land, Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Sam Spade, and The Shadow. This was the beginning of the Wold Newton Universe, which has become a preoccupation of many writers and fans over the years.
²

A Feast Unknown
was the first major work in what would become known as Philip José Farmers “Pulp Period.” It is obvious, in retrospect, that his research for the two biographies informed his writing of
A Feast Unknown.
In fact, the novel was clearly inspired by his research and the messages that Farmer had been conveying in his work up to that time.

In his Pulp Period, Farmer would write several novels and stories, all consequent of his seminal work in A
Feast Unknown
³

Lord of the Trees
(Lord Grandrith novel, 1970)*

The Mad Goblin
(Doc Caliban novel, 1970)*

Lord Tyger
(novel, 1970)*

Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke
(Wold Newton biography, 1972)

Time’s Last Gift
(a Wold Newton Prehistory novel, 1972)*

The Other Log of Phileas Fogg
(Wold Newton novel, 1973)*

Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life
(Wold Newton biography, 1973)

The Adventure of the Peerless Peer
(Wold Newton: Sherlock Holmes/Lord Greystoke novel, 1974)*[Rewritten as “The Adventure of the Three Madmen”—with Mowgli replacing Greystoke—in the collection
The Grand Adventure
(1984)]

Hadon of Ancient Opar
(Wold Newton Prehistory novel in the
Khokarsa
cycle, 1974)*

Flight to Opar
(Wold Newton Prehistory novel in the
Khokarsa
cycle, 1976)

Greatheart Silver
(short story collection, 1982)

Escape from Loki: Doc Savage’s First Adventure
(authorized Doc Savage novel, 1991)

The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel
(authorized Tarzan novel, 1999)

The Evil in Pemberley House
(Wold Newton novel about Doc Savage’s daughter, Patricia Wildman; with Win Scott Eckert, 2009)

The Song of Kwasin
(Wold Newton Prehistory novel in the
Khokarsa
cycle; with Christopher Paul Carey, 2012)

So,
A Feast Unknown
does not stand apart from Philip José Farmer’s literary legacy. It is the bridge between his earlier work and stories from his Pulp Period. We must understand
Feast
in order to properly comprehend his foray into the pulp world.

One final question is where Farmer got the title for his novel. It’s based upon this short erotic poem by May Swenson, an American poet well known for her love poetry, which appears in the front matter of every edition of
Feast:

“an Evolution strange

two Tongues touch

exchange

a Feast unknown

to stone

or tree or beast”

—May Swenson

A Feast Unknown
was an integral part of Philip José Farmers literary output and marked the beginning of his Pulp Period and of the Wold Newton Universe. It was not a mere indulgence in pornographic literature, but carried on the themes about human sexuality, morals, heroism, and distrust of authority that Farmer wrote about all of his life.

I disagree with Theodore Sturgeon. Philip José Farmers message was not that “ultimate sex combined with ultimate violence is ultimate absurdity.” Rather, I think it was that “ultimate allegiance to anything, person, persons, nations, or ideologies other than to one’s own moral integrity is ultimate absurdity.” In the end, even the greatest heroes of popular literature are merely human. They are sexual beings and through sex they form allegiances of family and blood to which they must remain loyal. They must not trade their moral responsibility with anyone else, even to attain the goal of eternal life. Both man in his natural state and man in his most civilized state cannot shirk moral responsibilities.

Arthur C. Sippo MD, MPH 4 February 2012

Art Sippo is a medical doctor who served in the U.S. Army and the National Guard for over twenty years. He is board certified in Aerospace and Occupational Medicine. Art has a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from St. Peter’s College (Magna Cum Laude), a medical degree from Vanderbilt, and a Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins. He was a Flight Surgeon for the 101st Airborne
Division, Director of the Biodynamics Research Division at the U.S. Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory, an exchange officer with the RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine in Farnborough, England, the Commander of the 145th MASH, the Assistant State Surgeon for the Ohio National Guard, and vice president of the Occupational Care Consultants in Toledo, Ohio. Currently he is the Medical Director of Express Medical Care in Fairview Heights, Illinois. He is also the cohost of
The Book Cave
podcast series that covers pulp fiction, comics, sci-fi, and adventure stories. Art has been a fan of Philip José Farmer since reading
A Feast Unknown
in 1969. He has been married to his beloved Katherine for twenty-five years and they have five children.

¹
Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke
, Doubleday & Co., 1972; University of Nebraska Press Bison Books, 2006.

²
In his foreword to
Lord of the Trees
(second in the Lord Grandrith/Doc Caliban series, Titan Books, 2012), Win Scott Eckert discusses the
similarities and differences between Grandrith and Greystoke, and Caliban and Savage, as well as how the Lord Grandrith/Doc Caliban novels relate to Wold Newton continuity.

³
Those titles currently part of Titan Books’ series of Farmer reissues are marked with an asterisk.