Seduction by Syrinx

By Peter Stoler

THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO

by CHARLES G. FINNEY

119 pages. Avon. $1.25.

"Step right up . . . if you dare!" reads the blurb on the garishly illustrated cover. "See the werewolf turn into a real flesh-and-blood woman--right before your very eyes." This pitchman's approach, aimed at newsstand buyers of books on the occult, is misleading, for the product, a slim volume entitled The Circus of Dr. Lao, is no tawdry sci-fi thriller. It is instead a blending of the sardonic style of Ambrose Bierce and the homespun hyperbole of Mark Twain.

Circus tells a tale that could happen only in America. A circus, under the direction of an apparently ageless Chinese named Dr. Lao, arrives one day in the town of Abalone, Ariz., and delivers delights that even Barnum would have hedged at promising. "The world is my idea," says Dr. Lao. "As such I present it to you." The circus, a metaphor for his world, is half dream, half nightmare. In its sideshow tents a puritanical schoolteacher is seduced by a syrinx-playing satyr, a gorgon turns an unbelieving harridan into "carnelian chalcedony," one of the harder varieties of building stone, and an absent-minded magician performs a couple of genuine miracles, transforming wine into water and raising a man from the dead. The show under the big top is even more spectacular. It offers a unicorn that pops balloons with its horn, a sphinx that asks riddles, a Walpurgisnacht revel attended by witches and presided over by Satan himself and, for the jaded, the sacrifice of a beautiful virgin.

Do these offerings impress the Abaloneans? Not on your tintype. Their expectations run more to trained-seal acts and Bobo the Dog-faced Boy, and their minds are thus unconditioned to accept such wonders. True members of the American booboisie, they heckle Dr. Lao and his magician during the performance and walk silently out into the hard Arizona sunlight when it is over. One suspects that Sinclair Lewis' Main Streeters might have done much the same thing.

For them--and for equally confused readers--Author Firmey, whose newsy style testifies to the years he spent as a reporter for the Tucson Star, offers an explanation of sorts. His shaggy-dog story is followed by a 20-page catalogue that lists all the male, female and child characters, animals, artifacts and edibles and even the contradictions that appear in the course of the story, an "explanation of the obvious" that as Finney himself insists, must be read to be appreciated.

Sea Serpent. The result is a send-up that anyone who has ever groaned through an overfootnoted attempt at scholarship will relish. Of a Mexican bartender Finney writes: "His forefathers came to this country a little after Hernando Cortez. His foremothers, Mayans, Toltecs, and Aztecs, were already here." A child devoured by a sea serpent is disposed of in an equally deadpan manner: "For seven years he was a diner; then for a few minutes he was a dinner. Ultimately he was incorporated into the cell structure of the sea serpent, a distinction he did not enjoy." Horses are "anachronisms less speedy, less beautiful, less efficient than the machines which have replaced them." The Gadarene swine are "food for sermons."

Originally published in 1935 with illustrations by the late Boris Artzybasheff, Circus made the same impact on the American public then as it did on the people of Finney's fictional Arizona town. Most readers found the fantasy too full of mythological references for their tastes. Finney, now 69, and living in retirement in Arizona, turned his attention back to city politics, murders and obituaries. But the book slowly won a sizable underground following, and in the years since then, two paperback editions have sold a million copies. The new edition can be forgiven its lurid jacket, for it will introduce an authentic American classic to a new generation of readers. In these tremulous days, when a man turns water into wine, hardly anybody is likely to complain that he didn't make beer instead.

sbPeter Stoler

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