P.T. BARNUM may not have invented the museum, the freak show, the zoo or the circus, but he was (during the 19th century, anyway) their greatest American impresario, a canny businessman who was just a little luckier, more energetic and more imaginative than his competitors. As a result, he wound up the most influential progenitor of much that is spectacular, vulgar, cheerfully phony and just plain fun about American popular culture. He's not only one of the founders of the circus that still bears his name, but he's also a direct ancestor of everything from Bat Boy in the Weekly World News to all those pseudoscience shows on the History Channel like "MonsterQuest" to the careers of such enterprising vulgarians and spectaclemongers as D.W. Griffith, Jerry Bruckheimer and the creators of reality television. Barnum himself took a refreshingly simple view of his career, saying to an interviewer at the end of his life, "I am a showman, and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me." Candace Fleming's lively and well-researched biography, "The Great and Only Barnum," takes an evenhanded approach to her subject, though it's clear from the start that she has real affection for him. Through a vivid central narrative, fascinating period photos and informative sidebars on everything from the history of the museum to the uses of circus slang, Fleming gives us an engrossing portrait of a Yankee entrepreneur who was inventive, shrewd and fundamentally happy; he loved to entertain people. Although he's best known today for his circus, Barnum made his reputation with his American Museum, located in New York on lower Broadway from 1842 to 1868. In the best chapter in the book, Fleming evokes the experience of a stroll through the building's seven "grand saloons," where one might see miniatures of a Venetian canal; gawp at midgets, Siamese twins and bearded ladies; visit the nation's first aquarium; and wander through the zoo on the top floor. From the start of his career, Barnum was labeled by some "a Prince of Humbugs" - Mark Twain said he represented "everything crass and self-serving in the American character" - but Fleming takes a more nuanced view. Frauds like the "Fejee Mermaid" (actually the upper body of a monkey sewn onto the tail of a fish) were pretty easy to see through, and Barnum himself understood that half the fun was being in on the joke. "Most people enjoy a harmless hoax," he said, and as one of his employees pointed out, "First Mr. Barnum humbugs them, and then they pay to hear him tell how he did it." For much of the book, Barnum comes across as a fundamentally good-hearted old huckster, like Frank Morgan as the man behind the curtain in "The Wizard of Oz." Indeed, according to Fleming, Barnum didn't even deliver the line most associated with him: "There's a sucker born every minute." Apparently that sentiment came from a competitor, surveying the lines outside Barnum's museum. Madame Josephine Clofulia, from "The Great and Only Barnum." As fond as she is of her subject, Fleming is scrupulously honest about the less savory aspects of his character. She makes it clear that he was a bad husband and a neglectful father. When his first wife died in 1873, Barnum was traveling in Europe - he got the news while buying racing ostriches in Hamburg - and not only did he not come home for the funeral, he remarried less than 13 weeks later, to an Englishwoman 40 years younger. More to the point, much of what he did professionally will strike the modern reader as cruel and exploitative. His first successful attraction was an elderly slave named Joice Heth whom he purchased (though Barnum said "rented") in 1835 and exhibited as George Washington's wet nurse, claiming she was 161 years old. This distasteful episode is followed by a career built in large part on the display of "human curiosities," not to mention countless exotic animals who often didn't survive long in his care. He lost a whole zooful of animals not once but twice, when his two museums in New York burned down one after the other. The saddest animal story in the book is that of Jumbo, the giant elephant Barnum purchased from a London zoo (to the outrage of the British public) and displayed at his circus, making millions. Even after Jumbo was killed in a collision with a train, Barnum managed to milk more money out of him, displaying both the elephant's skin, stretched over a wooden frame, and his skeleton, as a "double Jumbo" exhibit. Still, as Fleming is careful to note, Barnum was a man of his times, and perhaps not as callous as he seems in retrospect. The sideshow acts he employed in the American Museum were well paid by the standards of the day, and rather than being displayed like zoo animals, they mingled freely with visitors, shaking hands and answering questions. And while his behavior with Joice Heth was shameful under any circumstances, nearly 30 years later, during his successful run for the Connecticut Legislature in 1864, Barnum argued that black citizens should be given the vote. All in all, Fleming's biography of Barnum manages to be both honest and fun - which is more than you could say about Barnum himself - and the volume's handsome design, giving the book the look and feel of an old-time scrapbook, evokes both the era and Barnum's breathless showmanship. For younger readers who aren't necessarily interested in the history of American popular entertainment, Johanna Wright's lovely picture book "The Secret Circus" approaches the subject in a strikingly different way. Here, Parisian mice sneak out at night to visit "a circus that is so small and so secret, only the mice know how to find it." The portly mice troop unseen through the city to a big (or little?) top under a carousel in a park, where they eat peanuts and popcorn and watch circus mice juggle, perform acrobatics and tame a cat. The text has a gently incantatory rhythm, while the book's twilight colors perfectly evoke the magic hour when shadows deepen even as the lights become more luminous. While "The Great and Only Barnum" emphasizes the spectacle and razzle-dazzle of the circus, Wright's book is all about expectation and mystery, that effervescent moment when the spotlight first hits the ringmaster, and all the faces in the dark around the ring light up with anticipation. From "The Secret Circus." James Hynes's new novel, "Next," will be published in March. |