Circus Parade Read online

  Hurt and angered by criticism from home, Tully responded in a letter to the editor published in October 1927. Tully cited Mencken’s comparison of him to Gorky and noted he and the great Russian writer of the underclass have something else in common: both come from hometowns ashamed of them. Clearly old wounds had been opened. “When I was a hungry boy in St. Marys,” he wrote, “I got no understanding. I am getting none now.” If his goal was getting rich, he argued, then he might adopt the maudlin style of the then-popular novelist Harold Bell Wright. Instead, “I write the truth.” Had he taken his own counsel, he might have stopped there, but some bridges were made to be burned. In words that soured relations with many in his hometown for the rest of his life, Tully noted that “St. Marys is still in the same mental rut that it was in when I had the sadness of living there.” Nor would he deal in the “childish terms of small Ohio towns.” The sarcasm of the paper’s response dripped off the page. “Jim, you are great. Wonderful! You and Gorky!”

  Not content to get the last word but once, the Evening Leader returned to the subject of its famous native son in November by noting and reprinting the poor review of Circus Parade that appeared in a South Bend paper. The central criticism of the Indiana review—that Circus Parade presented an inaccurate picture of circus life—echoed the view of Eugene Whitmore in The Bookman. While acknowledging that Circus Parade had been “hailed by dozens of critics as a masterpiece of realistic writing,” Whitmore charged that the book was “no more than old-fashioned melodrama, minus the lily-white hero and heroine.” And, Whitmore continued, “Tully paints in dark colors, with no lightening contrasts.”

  On the first point, Whitmore was half-right. There are no heroes in Circus Parade, but a hero’s struggle is an essential element of melodrama. Whatever Circus Parade was, it wasn’t “old-fashioned melodrama.” On the second point, there can be no argument. Tully did paint in “dark colors.” If Whitmore had come to the book for sweetness and light, he had come to the wrong place and the wrong writer.

  In building his case that Circus Parade was not realistic, Whitmore relied on what he saw as factual errors about circus life. He chided Tully for faulty geography, quoting Tully for writing, “we traveled as far inland as Beaumont, Texas,” when, in fact, Beaumont is a port town on the Gulf of Mexico. Tully’s meaning of westward travel is clear, however, when he is correctly quoted: “We had journeyed along the Gulf of Mexico and as far inland as Beaumont, Texas.”

  Whitmore, who claimed “a lifetime of contact with circuses,” also objected to “Tully’s ignorance of the nomenclature of circus tents,” the description of loading and unloading the circus train, the troupe’s travel in the south before the “cotton has been picked and marketed,” and, in his view, other implausibilities and misstatements of fact. Clearly, Circus Parade was not to the liking of old circus men.

  James Stevens, whose acclaimed novel about Paul Bunyan and lumber camps had appeared in 1925, wrote Burton Rascoe, the editor of The Bookman, to protest Whitmore’s attack on Circus Parade. Twain’s nonfiction Life on the Mississippi, he noted, was roundly denounced by “old steamboat men,” and lawyers quibbled with Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. A novelist, Stevens argued, is certainly allowed to sacrifice “fact for effect.”

  For his part, Tully dismissed Whitmore as a circus press agent. And, if some of the book seemed unbelievable, he had in fact excluded some memories that readers might have found too far-fetched. Tully wrote H. L. Mencken that he had omitted as unbelievable the tale of a drunk emerging unhurt from a lion’s cage after flopping there for the night, even though he had witnessed it.

  Circus fans and apologists would not yield. The Literary Guild received many cancellations over its selection of the book and, when it appeared in 1929 that a film version of Circus Parade would be produced, the Circus Fans Association mounted a vigorous publicity campaign opposing the movie. The Circus Parade movie was never made. A gritty portrayal of the big top would finally reach the big screen in 1932. It was Dracula director Tod Browning’s Freaks, and it too was roundly condemned, even banned. More than seventy years later, Freaks is a cult classic.

  Circus Parade would not be the last time that Tully ended up in the gun sights of censors and other self-appointed guardians of public taste and morality. In an odd footnote to Circus Parade and censorship, John O’Hara defended his use of the word “nookey” in a story he submitted to The New Yorker in 1960. If Jim Tully could use “goosey” in Circus Parade, O’Hara argued to William Maxwell, then “nookey” should be allowed to stand.

  In Beggars of Life, Jim Tully found his voice: raw, powerful, savage yet lyrical. In Circus Parade that voice reached full-throated maturity: still savage, yet more confident in its ability to guide the reader down dark roads.

  I: The Lion Tamer

  I: The Lion Tamer

  IT was my second hobo journey through Mississippi. After the first I had vowed never to return, but Arkansas moonshine had changed my plans. Three times the first week I narrowly escaped arrest. Then hurrying toward Louisiana, I lost track of the days of the week and month. There was no need to know. I had, as the hoboes say, dragged a long haul from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to McComb City, Mississippi, some hundreds of miles. The latter town is a sun-scorched group of frame houses stretched forlornly along the Illinois Central tracks, ninety miles from New Orleans.

  Half dazed from loss of sleep, weak from hunger, and irritated by vermin-infested clothes, I resolved to leave the road for a spell. The terrible Mississippi vagrancy law hung over me. Under that law an officer is given two dollars and a half for every vagrant he captures alive. In other parts of the United States a tramp is not molested if he keeps off railroad property, but in Mississippi he is hunted up hill and down dale for the two dollars and fifty cents.

  Once captured, he is given a fine of seventy-five dollars. Having no money, he is made to work the fine out—at twenty cents a day! This comes to about eleven months and twenty-nine days, allowing a few days for good behavior. But there is, furthermore, a joker. The prisoner always needs clothing. He is charged three dollars for a fifty-cent pair of overalls, and seven dollars for a pair of dollar-and-a-quarter brogans. These debts are added to his sentence and worked out at twenty cents a day. It is no uncommon thing for a friendless man to spend several years as a peon in Mississippi. So I had reason to worry.

  Life had been completely against me for weeks. I had, with the sincerest motives, left Hot Springs for the remoter Arkansas wilds with a pair of loaded dice in my pocket. I hoped to trade my virtuosity with them for the money which the blasé lumberjacks had taken from the Lumber Interests. With this end in view I had actually worked two weeks at a camp near Pine Bluff. When pay-day came I started a crap game on the stump of an immense pine tree. To my befuddled consternation I lost every dime I had. And I had worked so hard for the money! Trekking wearily back to camp after the game, I felt sure that someone had cheated, but not wishing to accuse anyone unjustly, I kept still. The Jewish manager of the company store had played.

  It was my intention to beg a few dollars and leave the camp next morning. But a cyclone, speeding hundreds of miles an hour, roared across the State. It broke large trees as though they were toothpicks in the hands of traveling salesmen. It was a swirling funnel of doom. It sounded like the agitated rumbling of thousands of locomotives climbing a steep hill. We hurried to the cyclone cellars dug deep in the ground. The landscape next morning was as clean as a desert bone. I was drafted into the army of labor again. On my next pay-day I started another crap game in which the Jewish storekeeper played. I lost again.

  Downcast, I left Pine Bluff and finally reached McComb City. Not wishing to bother the police with my presence, I circled the town. Five miles beyond it I walked toward the railroad tracks again. I waited on a grade which freight trains would climb slowly. In about an hour a coatless Negro wearing a black satin shirt limped along the track. He whistled My country, ’tis of thee.

  “Which way, Patriot?” I
yelled.

  “Lawdy, boy—you sure skeert me. I done thought you was the law!” He laughed. “I’se on my way, brotheh, out of Mississip to Luziana. An bulieve me, boy, dey t’rows de key ’way on you when dey gets you heah. You bettah walk along wit’ me—I’se headed south. Dey’s a circus oveh in Baton—an’ I’m a-trailin’ it.”

  Lonely, I joined the Negro and headed for Louisiana. He was a beggar who followed crowds—a professional trailer. When we reached New Orleans, he fell into the train of an evangelist who was packing a tabernacle in the city. I went on to Baton Rouge and the circus.

  The ringmaster gave me a job helping take care of the animals. My duties were light, and my sense of freedom was enhanced by seeing the animals behind the bars. The man under whom I worked was known as the lion tamer. He helped me get clean clothing and new shoes. It was fully a week before I recovered from the punishment of the road. I soon realized that my Negro acquaintance had been wise in not trailing that circus. It already had too many trailers following it.

  Trailers are men who follow circuses or anything else that draws a crowd. They live by preying upon the people. Among the trailers with this circus were legless men called crawlers, who traveled with their bodies strapped to small wheeled platforms. They propelled themselves with stirrups held in each hand. They literally walked with their hands. Each time they struck the ground with a stirrup the wheels rolled under them. There were, too, trailers born double-jointed, who twisted their bodies in every conceivable and grotesque manner. Hard faces they had, and they moaned with pain when anyone drew near who might give money. Other trailers there were who could play the part of blind men. Yet others knew how to twist their hands.

  One trailer carried a hard slice of bread with him. He would drop it on the sidewalk at a convenient place. When he saw a person approaching he would dive madly for the bread. This trick seldom failed to reap its reward. Another old trailer was a particular pet of the lion tamer’s. I soon became attached to him also. He walked about, playing blind, tapping a crooked gnarled cane on the pavement. He would tap three times every ten or twelve feet. He wore a long tobacco-stained beard that reached to his belt. The whiskers hid all of his face but the eyes, over which his brows projected at least an inch. He belonged to the great body of men who write. As may be supposed he was not always tolerant of other literati. Since his doggerel rhymed, he had a special scorn for writers of blank verse.

  “Them guys don’t say nothin’ an’ what they do say they don’t make no rhyme. They hain’t artists,” was the way he dismissed them. “Besides, they hain’t no money in blank verse. People don’t buy it. A fellow’s got to sell his stuff if he wants to eat. I wrote a lot o’ that damn blank verse one time, an’ I had to give it to a barber for a haircut. He used it for shavin’ paper. He’s just got through usin’ a swell big book of Shakespeare. Some critic give it to him.”

  This literary vagabond sold his own efforts for as low as ten cents a sheet. Playing the role of a neglected genius, he often begged large sums of money at the Southern colleges.

  The lion tamer was the king of our small world. He was a lithe, two hundred pound Negro. Twice a day he went into a cage with six lions. Three of them were vicious and had killed several men. The strain of appearing with them told on his nerves. He kept up his courage with liquor.

  Save for helping me to obtain clothes and shoes, he did not unbend to me until we had journeyed along the Gulf of Mexico and as far inland as Beaumont, Texas. The circus was pitched near some oil wells in Beaumont. I told the lion tamer something of the history of oil; I was from an oil section of Ohio. He was fascinated by the way wells were shot and the oil obtained. When I told him how nitro-glycerine was sent hundreds of feet into the earth and then exploded, and described the rush of the oil upward, he listened as though it were a fairy tale.

  From that day on we were close friends. Every trailer and flunky with the circus, it appeared, had told him a fascinating tale at some time or another. He was everybody’s friend. And yet his face was defiance carved in ebony. The more he drank the more it became stern and set. He never smiled. But he gave a great deal of his salary to the poor trailers.

  He was quick of movement and about six feet tall. He carried a musical instrument with him that was neither mandolin nor guitar. It was a contraption he had made himself. Often, when the show was over, he would evoke from that instrument the weirdest music in the world. I used to watch him as he played. The dim light would reveal his face, as drawn as a long-trained bruiser’s. His music had a soothing effect on the animals, especially the lions. He would sit very still and play late into the night. The more he drank, the more weird his music became. No one ever complained.

  A little ex-jockey, in charge of the horses, would often come and listen. We would seldom talk. Now and then an animal would make a moaning noise. Once the old Homeric trailer went suddenly dotty for an instant and screamed aloud. The lion tamer soothed him. The next day he wrote another poem.

  One night the old trailer, the ex-jockey, the lion tamer and myself talked about death.

  “I never worry about dying,” said the lion tamer, “when the Big Guy yells my name I’ll go—that’s all.”

  Just the same he would drink heavily before entering the cages with the animals. Curious as to how he managed to control them, I asked him the secret.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “You must always look an animal in the eye. They can tell by that how game you are. You never can fool them.”

  About three hundred miles from Beaumont a crowd gathered in front of a cage which contained two laughing hyenas and a brown bear. The bear was blind. It had lost its sight in a battle with a keeper who had wielded a fork. The spieler, with an imitation diamond in his red tie, began:

  “Ladies and Gentlemen! The first den contains the ferocious laughing hyenas and the largest brown bear in all the world. Denna Wyoming, the world-famous African lion tamer, will now enter their cage and put them through their unique performance.”

  I stood near the cage as Denna Wyoming came forward. I had never seen his face so stern. The breast of his blue velveteen coat was ornamented with many medals. He snapped a whip against his polished top boot. The band played.

  He swayed slightly as he bowed. The crowd applauded. Wyoming’s lip curled. It was the little hour of glory for which he lived—and worried. The laughing hyenas and brown bear were unimportant to him. It was his entrance into the lions’ cage that bothered him. The lions were already pacing excitedly up and down their iron prison next door.

  As the band played, Denna Wyoming slipped the bolt and entered the cage with the bear and hyenas. The brown bear lumbered from his corner. Suddenly Denna Wyoming slipped and fell. His arm hit the bear’s snout. It lurched forward and grabbed him in a tenacious grip. The crowd, evidently thinking it was all part of the show, cheered loudly. The lions next-door roared. The snarling hyenas sprang at the recumbent figure of the lion tamer and bit viciously at his legs. The bear flung its body against the back of the cage. The lions stood on their hind-legs, their forelegs between the bars of their cage.

  Soon everything was in confusion. Men yelled. Women fainted. Bob Cameron, the owner of the circus, hurried forward with a fork and prodded viciously at the animals. They paid no attention. The brown bear kept its grip, the hyenas snapped and tore. The white-washed wall became splotched with blood. I stood horrified.

  Denna Wyoming moaned. The lions roared louder. The band played wails of discordant music.

  The weazened ex-jockey dashed into the cage with a small board in his hand. His wrinkled and leather-tanned face was sterner than the lion tamer’s had ever been. He stood erect and slashed the sharp board through the air. It tore a hyena’s ear off. The hyenas both slouched away, jaws dripping. The brown bear let go its grip, and its head rolled from side to side as it backed away from its victim.

  The lion tamer lay still. His velveteen coat was in shreds. His medals were dirty and disarranged. One boot had been to
rn from his leg. The ex-jockey dragged him to the door. Attendants placed him on a wooden shutter and hurried away. The lion tamer’s heart quit pounding under his medals. The Big Guy had called his name.

  The withered ex-jockey held the board aloft in his hand. The bear sat between the hyenas, who snarled in their corners.

  “He’ll be all right in a minute, folks—just a little accident.”

  He motioned to the band. It became silent.

  “I’ll now enter the cage with the forest-bred lions.”

  The band played louder. The ex-jockey went into the lions’ cage with the small board in his hand. Having smelt blood, the lions puckered their noses.

  “Work fast, you sons of Erin or I’ll lop your ears off,” snapped the ex-jockey.

  His command cut the air like a knife. He hurried from the cage. “Bring me a drink—damn quick!” A flunky hurried for it.

  When the crowd was disbanded he went to the dead lion tamer. Trailers had stolen the medals from his coat. He still clutched the little whip in his hand. Cameron, the circus owner, sent messengers ahead to a town in which we were to appear in three days. The death of the lion tamer would put money in his till.

  The messengers announced that Denna Wyoming, the greatest lion tamer in the world, had been killed in mortal combat with six huge lions. His body would lie in state in the main tent in their fair city—a fit burial place for so brave a man. Lion tamers from Ringling’s, Barnum’s and John Robinson’s circuses were hurrying to Texas to act as pallbearers at their great comrade’s funeral. The town was placarded. The papers made headlines of the story.