To the left, we see the back cover of the 1964 Bantam edition of Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), which I purchased for $1.50 at the Chicago Powell’s in, let’s say, 1993, and read immediately. Messing around in the literature of the 1930s, I re-read it recently. Fittingly, the book is something of a freak, its own creature, a hodgepodge fantasy in a lightly satirical mode. Babbitt goes to the circus, but a circus full of mythological beasts. Everything on the back cover is in the novel. Strange things come to Abalone, Arizona, for just one day. A couple dozen characters read an ad, watch a parade, and experience peculiar events.
What does this book sound like? For a hundred page novel with dozens of
characters and weird critters, it’s kind of leisurely. This is how the circus magician resurrects a
dead man, a laborer in overalls, a cowboy hat, and “old worn army shoes”:
The corpse looked as if it was sleeping in a very uncomfortable position.
Apollonius began to pray a low, thick prayer. His eyeballs turned dead green; thin, hazy stuff floated out of his ears. He prayed and prayed and prayed. To the subtle spirit of life he sent his terrible invocation.
Then all of a sudden, when everyone was most[!] expecting it, the dead man came to life, sat up, coughed, and rubbed his eyes.
“Where the devil am I?” he wanted to know.
“You’re at the circus,” said the doctor.
“Well, lemme outa here,” said the man. “I got business to attend to.”
He got to his feet and started off with a slight limp.
Luther caught his arm as he made for the door. “Listen, mister,” he asked, “was you really dead.”
“Deader than hell, brother,” said the man and hurried on out of the tent. (39)
And that’s almost the last we see of him. Finney was an Arizona newspaper editor, and
if the characters are more or less types and caricatures, the vernacular
touches, the talk, is from life.
It is curious to see the ideas of the times wander through
the novel. Miss Agnes Birdsong,
high-school English teacher, has a memorable encounter with a satyr (“’I am a
calm, intelligent girl, and I have not seen Pan on Main Street,’” 23); it is not
even twenty years since Max Beerbohm mocked encounters with Pan on Main
Street. The climax of the novel is a
spectacle with a cast of eleven thousand (“’Why, that’s a goddam lie!’ said
Plumber Rogers. ‘There ain’t hardly that many people in Abalone,’” 6) depicting
the sacrifice of a virgin to a pagan god.
It has some interesting resemblances to Francis Stevens’s The Citadel of Fear (1918) and D. H. Lawrence’s “The Woman Who Rode Away” (1925). Perhaps it is a parody.
The novel as such ends on page 100 with the end of the
spectacle and the collapse of the circus tent.
Then follows the most surprising thing in the novel, “The Catalogue,”
nineteen pages of annotated lists. Sometimes greatly annotated (from “The Male Characters”):
The Dead Man Apollonius Brought Back To Life: Arnold R. Todhunter. A homesteader. Later on, when a Tribune reporter interviewed him about the hours he spent in the arms of death, he testified that he was just on the point of being issued a harp and a gown when Apollonius reclaimed his clay. He said Heaven reminded him more than anything else of an advertisement he had once read of Southern California. (103)
Lists of animals, statues, and “The Foodstuffs.” The next to last list is a series of plot
holes and confusing points.
The Circus of Dr. Lao won the 1935 National Book
Award for Most Dang Peculiar Book, a category they no longer award. It is a
unique little monster.
There is no way Steven Millhauser does not know the
novel. Ray Bradbury loved it, but I have
not read the obviously relevant Bradbury book.
Despite a reference to The Temptation of Saint Anthony
on page 113 (“Chimera: Described by Rabelais, Flaubert, and Finney”) I think I
will next poke at a couple more 1930s fantasies.
My title can be found on p. 94.
