THE ADULT, THE ARTIST AND THE CIRCUS

A mildly philosophic plea for the performers, the menagerie and the freaks

Editor’s Note: You enjoy the theatre and you enjoy art, but do you enjoy the circus? Did you go to the circus this year? And if so, did you have a really good time? If you are bored at the circus, or if you don’t go for fear of being bored, read what a “modernistic” writer and painter has to say on this subject—then, at the very next opportunity, visit the circus and be bored—if you can be!

When something joyous, which made our childhood particularly worth while, fails to delight us as adults, we go through the apparently serene process of assuming a lofty attitude toward the “outgrown” pleasure. Upon close inspection, however, this process proves to be far from serene. Take our grown-up disdain of the circus, for instance. What actually happens, from the moment when the circus first occurs to us until the moment when we dismiss it as “childish,” is nothing less than a BATTLE.

For, at the very thought of “circus,” a swarm of long-imprisoned desires breaks jail. Armed with beauty and demanding justice and everywhere threatening us with curiosity and Spring and childhood, this mob of forgotten wishes begins to storm the supposedly impregnable fortifications of our Present. We are caught off our guard—we must defend ourselves somehow: any weapon will do. We seize the idea that a circus is nothing but a big and colourful toy especially invented for the amusement of undeveloped or naif minds. With this idea and the idea that the theatre is an enlightened form of entertainment worthy of our mature intelligences, we lay about us wildly; until—after a brave struggle—the motley horde retreats, abandoning its dead and wounded. But we ourselves are not unscathed: our wounds give us no peace; we must somehow forget them. Accordingly we betake ourselves to a theatre or to the movies. There, under the influence of a powerful anaesthetic known as Pretend, we forget not only the circus but all our other sorrows, including the immortal dictum of that inexorable philosopher Krazy Kat: It’s what’s behind me that I am.

But suppose, now, that an exciting experiment is attempted. Why not try to consider the circus directly, or as a self-sufficient phenomenon independent of the theatre, movies, radio and similar lofty amusements? I have in mind neither a detailed analysis of the American circus of today, nor yet a pompous monologue on the circus throughout the ages, but merely a few personal remarks anent the menagerie, the freaks, and the “big show” of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus.

And speaking of the menagerie, nothing can shake my conviction that a periodic and highly concentrated dose of wild animals—elephants, tigers, lions, leopards, jaguars, bears, wolves, giraffes, kangaroo, zebras, horned horses, camels, hyenas, rhinoceri and at least one hippopotamus—is indispensable to the happiness of all mature civilized human beings. Were Congress to pass a bill compelling every adult inhabitant of the United States of America to visit the circus at least twice a year, with the stipulation that each visitor must spend (willy-nilly) not less than half an hour in the menagerie, I believe that, throughout the entire country, four out of five hospitals, jails and insane-asylums would close down. It is my hunch that, as an immediate result of this simple legislation, hundreds of cripples—lame, halt and blind—would toss their infirmities to the winds, thousands of ill-starred homes would break into paeans of rejoicing—and millions of psychoanalysts would be thrown out of employment.

For the benefit of any disciple of Freud who may chance to peruse the above statement, I hereby whisper that my own totem is the elephant. And what, gentle subscriber to Vanity Fair, may your totem be? In case you aren’t sure, or think you haven’t any, I counsel you to take the very next train for whatever city the circus may happen to occupy (unless you are so fortunate as to have it with you at the moment). Above all, don’t be satisfied with a trip to some mere zoo; for zoos—poor, placid, colourless things that they are—completely lack that outrageous intensity which makes the circus menagerie unique as a curative institution and endows the denizens of that institution with a fourth- or fifth-dimensional significance for the neuroses.

By this time, surely, my worthy readers have doubtless decided that I myself am a salaried member of that branch of the circus which comprises “the strange people.” Although this is an error—although I am neither a Missing Link nor a Fat Lady nor yet an Ambassador from Mars—I may mention that I feel highly complimented at being mistaken for one or all of these prodigies. For (in my opinion) happy is that writer, who, in the course of his lifetime, succeeds in making a dozen persons react to his personality as genuinely or vividly as millions react, each and every year, to the magnetic personality of Zip, the What-Is-It! Nor can I refrain, at this point, saluting also the Giant, the Pygmy, the Pin-Head, the unutterably refined Human Skeleton and the other distinguished members of Zip’s very select society. Having done this, I shall spare my readers further rhapsody. In return for the favor, I ask that all who are interested in a sensitive interpretation of certain world-famous oddities, as well as in the origin of what we now call the American circus, will hasten to consult (if by mischance they have not already done so) M.R. Werner’s excellent and extremely entertaining biography: Barnum.

Having cast rapid glances at the menagerie and the freaks, we enter “the big top”—where dwells the really-truly circus-show. This may be described as a gigantic spectacle; which is surrounded by an audience,—in contrast to our modern theatres, where an audience and a spectacle merely confront each other. The show itself, we immediately notice, has a definite kind of bigness. By “definite kind,” I mean that the bigness of the circus-show is intrinsic—like the bigness of an elephant or of a skyscraper—not superficial, as in the case of an enlarged snapshot. The nature of this bigness becomes apparent when we perceive that it is never, for so much as the fraction of an instant, motionless. Anyone who has stood just across the street from the Woolworth Building and has watched it wriggle upward like a skyrocket, or who has observed the irrevocably, gradually moving structure of an elephant which is “standing still”—anyone who has beheld these miracles, will understand me when I say the bigness of the circus-show is a kind of mobility. Movement is the very stuff out of which this dream is made. Or we may say that movement is the content, the subject matter, of the circus-show, while bigness is its form; provided we realize that here (as in all true “works of art”) content and form are aspects of a homogeneous whole.

At this great spectacle, as nowhere else, the adult onlooker knows that unbelievably skilful and inexorably beautiful and unimaginably dangerous things are continually happening. But this is not all: he feels that there is a little too much going on at any given moment. Here and now, I desire to point out that this is as it should be. To the objection that the three-ring circus “creates such a confused impression,” I beg to reply: “Speaking of confused impressions—how about the down-rush of a first-rate roller coaster or the incomparable yearning of the Parisian balançoirs à vapeur, not to mention the solemn visit of a seventy-five centimetre projectile and the frivolous propinquity of Shrapnel?” For it is with thrilling experiences of a life-or-death order (including certain authentic “works of art”—and most emphatically not with going to the movies or putting out the cat) that the circus-show entirely belongs.

Within “the big top,” as nowhere else on earth, is to be found Actuality. Living players play with living. There are no tears produced by onion-oil and Mr. Nevin’s Rosary, no pasteboard hovels and papier-mâché palaces, no “cuts,” “retakes,” or “N.G.’s”—and no curtain calls after suicide. At positively every performance Death Himself lurks, glides, struts, breathes, is. Lest any agony be missing, a mob of clowns tumbles loudly in and out of that inconceivably sheer fabric of doom, whose beauty seems endangered by the spectator’s least heartbeat or whisper. As for the incredible and living designs, woven in this fabric by animal trainers, equestrians, acrobats—they are immune to forgetfulness in the same way that certain paintings, poems and musical compositions are immune. Although it was only once, and twenty-odd years ago, that my eyes had the extraordinary honour to behold a slight young man whose first name was DANGER DERIDING DEATH DEFYING DESPERATE DAREDEVIL DIAVOLO LOOPS THE LOOP ON A BICYCLE (his last name being, if I am not mistaken, PORTHOS: LEAPS THE GAP OVER FIVE ELEPHANTS), I have not forgotten this person and shall never forget him, simply because he was a great artist—who, like Paul Cézanne, died the most fortunate and illustrious of deaths: died at the motif, and in the execution of his art.

So, ungentle reader, (as you and I value what we should be ashamed—after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels—to call our “lives,”) let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and “art” or “the arts.” Let us not forget that every authentic “work of art” is in and of itself alive and that, however “the arts” may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as “beauty.” This being so, our three ring circus is art—for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic manifestation of “beauty” is as childish, as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is “childish,” is idiotic.

In closing, the present writer wishes to state (1) that an extremely intimate connection exists between Con Colleanos’ forward somersault (from and to a wire in mid-air) and Homer’s Odyssey (2) that a sure method of understanding Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, is to study the voluminous precision and fugual delicacy of Mr. Ringling’s “Ponderous Pachyderms under the direction of the greatest of all animal trainers” (3) that El Greco, in painting, and “Ernest Clark, in his triple somersaulting double-twisting and reverse flights through space” give strikingly similar performances, and (4) that the fluent technique of seals and of sea lions comprises certain untranslatable idioms, certain innate flexions, which astonishingly resemble the spiritual essence of poetry.

From Vanity Fair, October 1925: line drawings by the author.