The Greatest Show
by Michael Downs
Louisiana State University Press, 2012
978-0807144527, 208 pp., $23.00 paperback
Journalists writing fiction and poets reading short stories—by these signs you shall know the end is near. The literary apocalypse is fantastic to behold, and even better to read. Michael Downs' The Greatest Show is a collection of short stories spanning sixty-five years and dozens of people whose lives were altered by the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire. True, the words might go all the way across the page, but these stories are closer to being lavish narrative poems, full of imagination, scaffolded with lean, well-chiseled sentences, and sung with an emotional lyric. Downs, who started as a gum shoe reporter in his hometown of Hartford, has learned more over the years from W. H. Auden than he has from Faulkner.
The lead story "Ania" opens like an Anderson Cooper news crawl: "Their courtship began in the summer of 1936 when she was seventeen and he was twenty." They, she, he...by not referring to anyone by name Downs refers to everyone, and who among us can read the word courtship without the briefest flash of some old love from our youth? Downs, the poet now, concludes the leading stanza: "His hands were chapped and shy."
Downs balances the concrete-chapped-with the abstract-shy. By joining the physical with the emotional image his symbols become two- and three-dimensional. This makes his metaphors so life-like that the reader needs frequent guideposts to distinguish the two. These Downs simply and effortlessly provides, thanks to the enfilading style of his journalism past. Downs is a man who is completely unafraid of possibilities yet neither is he charmed by their infinite range. His imagination settles into the simplest gestures. "It was all he could say before a shiver overtook his throat," Downs writes in "Ex-Husband, Years Removed." As a writer he constantly goes beyond description to wonder about the why and the why not of a character: "Something in Mrs. Patterson's grief seemed terrible and pure, something that reminded Ania of only one thing: how on first seeing Teddy, red and squalling, she felt as if she had touched the electric nerve where everything begins and ends, so far from this world it is nearly forgotten." Downs' electric nerve is so much a better word than soul.
If grief is the electric nerve of this book, then guilt must be its heart: "She worked hard to be a loving wife, to hide her deceit and atone for it...She began to resent him, and though she still made him pancakes, she mixed less sympathy into the batter." The biggest guilt of all-and the deepest cut of resentment-is the great circus fire. This is Downs' defining metaphor. The circus represents our escape from the struggle between our ideals and our actual lives. This is why the clown has a sad face painted over happy eyes. The book's epigraph, from W. H. Auden, who'd emigrated to America about the time of Ania, says it better: "If we should weep when clowns put on their show,/ If we should stumble when musicians play,/ Time will say nothing but I told you so."
The trauma in these short stories is that the escape, the circus, has burned to the ground. Where was the husband? He'd enlisted the years prior to defend the country's ideals in the Second World War. Like the husband, Downs' focus is on the aftermath, much the reverse of so many 9-11 writings which focus on the prelude or the ash clouds. Downs the reporter wants names and addresses. He needs survivors to interview. Downs the poet wants parallel arcs. He needs the answers to questions which cannot be asked because they are unanswerable.
One parallel arc to the big fire in "Ania" is her attention to candles. She uses them to pray. She uses them for reading light. She uses them for dinner settings. Forty years ago Jim Deetz wrote a slim volume about material culture that probably sold one copy. Downs must have been the buyer. Like Deetz, Downs conveys that candles can be ideological, or votive, as well as practical and social. Downs' candles are the perfect foils for a world that is conflicted between ideals and actuals and ultimately perishes in flames. The darkness which follows is replaced in turn by community. Husbands return from war and new generations are born. By the end of the book the burned child Teddy is a grandfather and his burned mother has risen in status from that of a mad—a utilitarian worker—to that of a revered, almost religious figure in the community, a votive icon whose face is impossible to capture by any painter skilled in any art.
That artist is Downs. Each story is an imperfect portrait he must keep returning to and we as readers are exhilarated when he gets it so right. At times Downs seems like the burned boy, the nurturing mother, the nostalgic father, the sleepless reporter, the dreamy poet. And Downs, like his characters, is never alone. Each struggles with love relationships and dealing with loss in every story. The relationships that endure tend to be filled with pleasant miseries. Mrs. Patterson, "whose mouth grew smaller with concern until her red lips formed a carnation," is stricken both by not being able to have a child and by not being able to adopt. She finds solace in taking her maid's burned child to the park. When the town's gossip columnist dies in the blaze, no one comes to her funeral and then her husband is devastated to learn she had many lovers when he discovers her letters at his brother-in-law's house. The two men weren't close, but each had married the other's sister so their connection with each other was strong and indecipherable as when the husband watches his sister and brother-in-law take hold:
Poor Gal isn't burned in the fire and this becomes his curse. Like all of the survivors he practically competes for grief. All want to win the prize for being saddest victim because being sad, being overcome with sobs, is a kind of trick for getting off the hook of responsibility, of having honesty in a relationship, of having great love. It's so much easier to be merely daunted and even a little deranged by it: "His eyes felt huge in his head, he could see every moment of his life with Sophie, all the beauty and all the madness. He wanted her with him in this room, on this bed, to test him once again with her cruelties."
Downs builds this image of conflicted relationships early in the collection so we can admire Teddy later in life for having acquired the irony we should all so dearly seek in order to heal. This journey climaxes in "At the Beach," where even the house pets have trouble with relationships: "Rosa's cat was short-haired, black and white, with half its left ear torn away and a tail that twitched when the cat meant to do evil. If Rosa failed to notice the tail, the cat might rake claws across her hand as she petted him. She fancied herself a cat lover, but this animal led her to thoughts of betrayal." As Rosa gets to know Teddy, the cat runs away, carrying off with it Rosa's inability to connect. Later the two are alone on the beach. The heavily scarred Teddy is fishing, "fishing for anything worth eating, but pulling in only croakers." When he runs out of bait, he
This extended metaphor of the croaker illuminates how Teddy, hoping for something good, has to cut up the bad in order to catch it. In this way he's cut up the story of the great fire that burned him and his mother. He's salvaged himself, and the casting and the reeling-in of it go on forever. It's a beautiful moment, one of many in this book which Downs uses to contrast the darkness which has taken over so many lives.
If our biggest fear is loss and dying alone, then The Greatest Show is everyone's best hope, but apart from its emotional impact on the reader, the genius of this collection is that Downs has given us a way to get our arms around the poetry of witness. We'd all like to tell a story and there seems to be an endless number of great circus fires in our world to tell about, whether the circus burns in Somalia or Wall Street. Down's woven short stories shows us that the poetry of witness wants a reporter's keen eye, but also a little distance, some bit of remove in time or space so that we can still embrace each other in spite of the horror. Downs doesn't only give us a good story; he shows us how to write our own. It's an important lesson that this good teacher tells us with his heart and not a piece of chalk..—Barrett Warner
hauled in the line, found a croaker on the end of it. He took a knife from his pocket and decapitated the croaker and put its head in the can. Then he sliced the belly and with his finger scooped out the tiny entrails. He spread these among the hooks, added the head to another, then cast it all back to sea.