Clowning around in James Purdy's: The Paradise Circus.

Bennett, Michael Y.

In anticipation of the (delayed, but) forthcoming edition of four plays by James Purdy (Selected Plays. Brice, The Paradise Circus, Where Quentin Goes, and Ruthanna Elder [Evanston: Northwestern UP, forthcoming 2007]), I will examine the previously unpublished play The Paradise Circus. In order for Arthur, the protagonist, to live the lives he wants, he must clown around in this "circus" to assume the role of another: he must become another to become oneself. Though full of obvious 'play' and humor, these transformations are painful to all involved; even clown makeup cannot hide the pain.

It is easy to imagine a modern day circus as a Bhaktinian carnival. Clowns operate through degradation, but also by overcoming degradation until they do it correctly. As Bhaktin says, "the material bodily principle is a triumphant, festive principle (Rabelais and His World. Trans. by Helene Iswolsky. [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 19841]: 19). In the face of degradation, clowns triumph over folly. Bhaktin explains how regeneration, "a new birth" (21), comes out of degradation. It is when Purdy's characters face degradation that they are renewed. By permanently donning the mask of another, by degrading themselves and reducing their existence to a new bodily existence, they become themselves.

The Paradise Circus is about the relationship between Arthur, who is mourning the death of one son, Rainforth, and his two living sons, Joel and Gregory. Before Arthur--a miser--"sells" his sons to Onofrio, the head of a circus, for ten thousand dollars in order to give his sons a career that Arthur sees as fit for their simple love of making merry-go-round horses, he meets with the family doctor. Dr. Hallam, who is both the raisonner, the critical outside observer, and a confidant to Arthur, much like Dr. Larkin, in James Home's, Margaret Fleming. Hallam correctly diagnoses the problem: Sometimes young men can get sick for sheer want of a little encouragement and downright affection, Rawlings ... And all they hear from you, if you will pardon my frankness, is a steady diet of praises for Rainforth. (The Paradise Circus. Unpublished Play. c1991. Purdy's agent, John Uecke''s personal copy: 7)

If Arthur could follow Hallam's simple prescription and encourage Joel and Gregory, the conflict in the play could have been avoided. It is in his unwillingness, or inability, to do so that we get the first of two degradations that produce growth. The memory of Arthur's perfect son, Rainforth, haunts him. In the face of Rainforth's perfection, everyone is a disappointment. When Onofrio offers to "buy" his other sons, Arthur say, "they have been a bitter disappointment to me, both of them" (13). However, as years pass he longs to see his boys again, but Hallam warns him that they have changed, have taken on a "magisterial" aura (24). They have so surpassed Rainforth that Arthur forgets his "grief for Rainforth" (15) and is preoccupied in getting the Joel and Gregory to love him.

Arthur now says that he has had enough of doctors. In Purdy's circus, even the raisonner and confidant must don a different guise. Thus, Arthur decides to visit the local witch doctor, Alda Pennington, to see if she can help him get his sons back. The traditional remedy for the situation--giving his children encouragement and showing more love--gives way to an untraditional remedy from this untraditional healer, a witch doctor. The audience must be weary of her before she says a word. The stage directions read, Antique furniture everywhere, beautiful carpets and mirrors. Fresh flowers. An air of restrained wealth and comfort, not the house one would associate with a midwife or "witch." (27)

We know that Alda must be good at what she does, or at least good enough to trick people out of their money and make enough to buy antique furniture and beautiful carpets. But we might also look at her in another way, as a person in touch with reality. We do not see the normal collection of ghastly thingamabobs that a "witch" would collect. Instead her decorations are sensible, even refined. She has one foot in magic, but the other is in a life of privilege.

Both raisonner and confidant like Dr. Hallam, she quickly assesses the situation:

RAWLINGS: They did come to see me a while back... But without wanting to ... They were cold as the brook after snowfall ... Hardly said a word.

ALDA: Just as they were trained. (28)

After years of being ignored by their father and thus trained not to love him, Joel and Gregory naturally had nothing to say to him. Dr. Hallam's prescription might have worked, had Arthur used it. But he sold his boys. Now, to win their affection an unusual medicine is needed. Alda, then, becomes a carnivalesqe (sic) doctor, one who deals in performance and bodily gestures. Her "cure" is one of exaggerated excess, degrading and almost self-destructive, but necessary. Alda tells Arthur that he must get ride of the "blood money" that Onofrio returned to him when the boys left the circus, not by giving it away to charity (34), but rather by burning it and, thus, symbolically ridding himself of the "bargain" that he had made., freeing his sons and also freeing himself from his guilt. By becoming another, the opposite of a miser, one who literally burns his own money, Arthur becomes the good father he always could have been. When he burns the money, he destroys the intangible to make room for the tangible, his sons.

Once the two degradations take place, that of a physician to a "witch doctor" and of a money-lover to a loving father, the end of the play features the rebirth Arthur. He is, however, dying. But time remains for him to make an impact on the lives of Joel and Gregory. And with this, Dr. Hallam returns. Now that the unnatural deed of selling his sons was remedied by the unnatural act of burning the money, traditional medicine may again be of use. On his deathbed, Arthur asks Hallam,

RAWLINGS: And what would you say if you was in my stead, Doc.

HALLAM: I would say ... (hesitates) I would hope one day they would find it in their hearts to overlook my failings, and that when they were my age they would understand how hard it is to tell those we love how much we love them. (85)

And this is what Arthur tells Gregory (Joel was at Alda's at the time). Even in the act of dying, something is reborn, not just in Arthur's heart, but in the hearts of his sons. As the Passover saying goes, "Our story begins with degradation, our telling ends with glory."

Michael Y. Bennett University of Massachusetts, Amherst