" Just Mention My Name "

The Eventful Life of Phineas Taylor Barnum*

In Bethel, Conn., Barnum was born on July 5, 1810. He arrived late for the holiday. But it was safer so.

He began by keeping a store. At the age of 18 he met Charity Hallet, who became wife and pious companion. At 26, he owned the first "show" entitled " Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theatre," with which he visited towns as far as New Orleans. His prize " exhibit" was a negress who claimed to be 161 years old and to have been George Washington's nurse. Juggling on street corners and selling bibles contributed to his support.

Barnum's first fortune, acquired between 1841 and 1851, began with his ownership of the American Museum, reached its climax when he imported Jenny Lind, disappeared with a clock company.

His museum was the embryo of the circus " side show." " Curiosities natural and unnatural ": the Feegee Mermaid, the diorama of Napoleon's funeral, the negro who had cured his skin of " color" and who predicted the fading out of slavery, cannibals and grotesque sea monsters, beauty shows and the Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself were only some of the sensations propagated by the " master of monstrosities."

Barnum's real business was publicity. His code was: " Just mention my name." He always gave public thanks to " blackmailers " for the notoriety they afforded him. Law suits and newspaper editors were his " go-getters." If he was accused of " faking" live whales out of India rubber, or of labeling a mere man "The Bearded Lady"--that too brought people to his museum.

The Woolly Horse was sold to the public twice:

First as Colonel Freemont's Nondescript or Woolly Horse. " He is extremely complex--made up of the Elephant, Deer, Horse, Buffalo, Camel and Sheep. Easily bounds 15 feet high. It is undoubtedly Nature's Last. Admission 25 cents."

Second as " The big laugh and how the Woolly Horse fooled 'em," in his Autobiography. Each year Barnum added an appendix to the story of his life, that the public might keep itself up-to-date with his puns and practical jokes.

Music in the United States was advanced many years by Barnum's unique exploitation of Jenny Lind. The lovely Swedish Nightingale was the first European artist to brave "the American Jungle." Barnum said: " Her whole life was a song," and from it he made half a million.

At 50 he made the circus. Later, when a baby elephant, the first born in captivity, arrived in Bailey's rival camp, Barnum offered $100,000 for the infant, a fact which Bailey so blatantly advertised that Barnum was forced to merge with his rival in self-defense.

"Jumbo" was the greatest and most sentimentalized of circus animals. Barnum succeeded in bribing away from England this "largest known" elephant. Jumbo's first six weeks at Madison Square Garden attracted $336,000. After he was killed by a train accident, he was stuffed and given to Tufts College, which still has Jumbo's head as its emblem.

Barnum's patriotism, loud and strong, served him as a financial asset. His personal piety befriended church and circus. Clergymen not only used free tickets, which Barnum sent them for " The Greatest Moral Show on Earth," but they brought Barnum's name into the pulpit.

Mr. Werner's book is a record of American popular taste during the century of the nation's adolescence. The unsophiscated public loved to be fooled, and Barnum, more than Lincoln, " was typical of the time." Between the picture of his wife, Charity, and his elephant, Jumbo, was the America which Europe believed to be uncivilizable.

Cheap Reading

A Safe Outlet for Discontent and Crimes of Passion

Bernard Shaw once said that ten years of cheap reading had transformed the English from the most stolid nation on earth to the most sentimental and hysterical, but, as with generalizations of this sort, the exact opposite is also true. People who are allowed to satisfy their sentimental and morbid desires, and to indulge their delusions of grandeur by way of the romantic novel, the detective story and the heroic biography, are less liable to exercise them in real life. What the Freudians call a " compensation mechanism " is set up by trashy literature which dissipates the energy of the impulses which might otherwise be seriously translated into action. Not that cheap reading is a cure for hysteria, for the great mass of people are probably irremediably twisted and warped emotionally by these complexes anyway, but it is rendered less intense and harmful. In fact, in a later essay Shaw has admitted that if the public appetite for murder, cruelty, romantic love and heroics were not stupefied from time to time by these substitutes we should all be subject to relapses into primitive savagery.

Public violence flourishes in Mer Rouge and Harrison, where the benign sedatives dispensed by Zane Grey and Harold Bell Wright are comparatively scarce. The Klan riots in country towns, out of the route of the urban newspaper syndicates with their penny thrilllers every afternoon. And it is a notorious fact that crimes of passion and illicit intrigues are commoner, compared with the population, and more violent in rural communities than in the cities.

For the cities are saturated with the literature of escape. Does an old maid or a Babbitt couple pine for romance, they can find it in The New York Journal, the cheap fiction magazines, or the novels of George Barr McCutcheon, Emerson Hough iand Rupert Hughes. Does a young man long for success and a "strong character," he can imagine he is acquiring these things from the American Magazine. Does a harassed and ineffectual "white collar slave" crave some denial of the harshness of existence, he has but to turn to the sermonettes and pepto-optimism concocted daily by Dr. Frank Crane and his prolific school. The literature of escape may draw the sarcastic fire of the critics, for it is untrue, badly written and inspires false hopes, but for the common man it is often a godsend.

Good Books

The following estimates of books most in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

THE GENTLEMEN FROM SAN FRANCISCO AND OTHER STORIES--I. A. Bunin--Seltzer ($1.50). The title story of this volume (translated from the Russian) relates the grim history of an American millionaire who has made his money and in company with his wife and daughter travels expensively all over the south of Europe. He has the best of service and accommodations; but the weather is always bad, and he doesn't find the expected enjoyment. At Capri he is stricken with mortal illness. At once the hotel manager loses his politeness, hustles the body into a cheap coffin, and it is carried back on the same expensive ship to America. The story is told with vividness and cruel humor. The other stories relate strange and morbid events. All are lone with great art.

LADY INTO Fox--David Garnett-- Knopf ($1.50). In fable form and prose style Mr. Garnett (son of Edward Garnett, the famous critic) relates the curious story of a Mr. Tebrick's wife who is turned into a fox. The poor man tries to treat the vixen as his wife. He plays cribbage.with her, reads to her from Clarissa Harlowe, eats delicate meals with her. Day after day she reverts more and more into a fox, and at last is killed by the hounds. Mr. Garnett might easily have been grotesque, sensational and melodramatic, or merely absurd. Instead, he has written a fable in the best tradition. His style is serious and poetic; he avoids the obvious grotesqueness of his story, and achieves a work of art.

NACHA REGTJLES--Manuel Galvez --Dutton ($3.00). This South American novel which won the Buenos Aires Prize for Letters in 1920 is not for light entertainment or easy reading. It is a thoughtful and sincere plea for the investigation and improvement of the so-called lower world in a great South American city. Its moral earnestness and stern purpose keep it from the obvious morbidness and distasteful pictures its plot inevitably suggests. Dr. Monsalvat, the hero, tries to rescue Nacha Regules from her cabaret life; and from the study of her position is led to begin a campaign for the salvation of all such characters. The pleading and sociology of the book rather get in the way of the story; but, despite this obvious objection and for all its unpleasant story, Nacha Regules is another voice in the new social conscience.

-- B -- RNT7M -- M. E. Werner -- Hareourt ($8.50).